after the sun goes down (Part 1 of 3)
by year-of-the-pineapple
Summary: A lonely survivalist and a jaded ex-soldier happen to meet in post-apocalyptic America. While one struggles with his past, the other realises that loneliness could be more dangerous than even the worst flesh-eating virus. - PART 1 OF A SERIES -
1. Chapter 1

**Howdy, thanks for clickedy clacking on this fic. Just fancied whacking out something with a bit more of a meaty plot than my last few.**

**Required reading:**

**This is an AU where a virus has turned most of the population into zombies. It's the same world as the anime, but set in a different context. Maka and Soul have never met in this version. Some of the scenes will probably be a bit dark, but I pretty much try to keep things fairly light-hearted throughout.**

She was 1674 miles from home, but even further in spirit.

Living in a stranger's house, sleeping in a stranger's bed and eating a stranger's food. Of course, the stranger in question had been dead for quite some time- probably around three years, if their full pantry was anything to go by. It looks like they hadn't survived long after the outbreak.

After the first wave, there had been a few people who called themselves 'survivors'. Those who had perhaps owned guns, or kept a particularly well-stocked kitchen. They had lasted maybe three, four months?

The creatures had gotten cleverer. Not _human_ clever; though of course they had used to be humans. But evolved somehow; learned how to throw rocks into glass windows. Become faster on their feet.

They were well-fed, back then.

Now? Not so much. Now, there weren't many people left to eat. Now, they were starving – and the few of them that had evolved to catch animals were even scarier than the first wave.

Even after the second wave, Maka had still seen people around. She had been travelling with a group of people for a little while, a few guys and one other girl. They'd all gone to school together, and she'd joined up with them.

It didn't take a genius to figure out that Maka was a good sort of person to have around; especially after the apocalypse. Resourceful. Unattached. Quick-witted.

Apocalypse 101.

She hadn't liked the group that much. The guys had been creepy, obsessive even. One of them had a strange tendency to talk a little too much about 'repopulation' while giving Maka the side-eye, something she found a little unpleasant.

Now it's been a year since she'd seen another soul, and she'd give anything to have Mr. Repopulate-the-earth by her side. Or anyone, for that matter. Convincing herself that she didn't need anybody had gotten just a little bit old, after all this time. And there was only so many times you could watch the same collection of old DVDs without beginning to lose your mind.

She feels it, more and more, creeping in. The madness. The loneliness. Total isolation- it had ways of messing with the human psyche that you can't imagine unless you're experiencing it. She had kept it away for so long, the feeling of despair; the void of anything meaningful, by keeping busy all these years, by staying alive. Now that it seemed she was the only person left on earth, it crept into any free thought that wasn't immediately occupied with physiological need.

Right now she finds herself staring into her own reflection, weighing up the pros and cons of having a full-blown conversation with herself in the mirror.

"On the one hand, it might help," she muses to herself. "But on the other hand. Am I going completely insane?"

She decides that it doesn't matter, and enthusiastically sticks her hand out as if to shake her reflections hand and her knuckles hit the glass, hard.

"Fuck!" she swears and retracts her hand, holding it with the other one in pain. "Well. Fuck you too!" she scowls at mirror-Maka with derision, turning away.

That girl was so unkempt, anyway. She couldn't stand to look at such a sight.

Then she sits down on a stranger's couch, holds her head in a stranger's hands, and starts to weep stranger's tears.


	2. Chapter 2

Days blow by without Maka ever really noticing, sometimes. For a while, she kept track of the date, marking every single passing night down somewhere. At first it was bits of paper, stuck on the wall. Then, just notches into the wall itself. When she had started moving houses periodically, it had become harder. She'd lose track of where she was at and have to start all over again again.

Now it's been so long that her point of reference is the rising sun for time; the changing weather patterns for date.

She licks her lips and stares up at the sky from the rooftop of the terrace she's currently occupying. "It's 3pm." She deduces. "Give or take an hour."

At that moment, a black cat jumps into her line of vision from some other rooftop. "Hello," she says to it, beckoning it over. Clearly, it was just as lonely as her, if the fact that it immediately starts rubbing itself on her leg is any indication. She sighs. "Summer's almost over, I can tell. It's starting to get colder, isn't it, buddy," she crouches down and scratches the cat behind the ears. "Are you hungry? There's no way you're feral. You must be somebody's…"

A noise in the distance startles her and the cat, whose hackles raise abruptly. Maka freezes and her right-hand twitches towards the gun on her belt in a second as her head whips around, trying to figure out where the sound is coming from.

It's familiar, oddly so. But not _apocalypse_ familiar; distant somehow.

As she stares in the direction she heard it coming from, she can see a faint orange blob floating down the street a few blocks down the road. Her fingers move away from her gun and she squints her eyes to see clearer.

Her mind makes the connection that the sound they both heard must have been the soft purr of a motorcycle in motion.

"Who or what is that?" she asks nobody, looking at the cat. "Surely _they_ haven't learned to ride bikes…" she muses, shuddering at the very thought of zombies on vespas. "Am I going completely mad? I'm hallucinating now?" she asks again, her voice sounding very small, and her throat very tight. She strokes the kitty's head to its palpable enjoyment. "Maybe you're a hallucination, too." She wonders. "Although, I was always a dog person. I don't know why I'd start imagining a _cat_ as a companion…"

She spends a few seconds willing herself to hallucinate a big shaggy German Shepherd, but when nothing comes to fruition, she steels her shoulders and stares back out where she had seen the orange blob in the distance.

"Guess you're _real_, then." She decides, licking her lips in an anticipatory fashion.


	3. Chapter 3

She spends at least a few hours each of the next few days on that same rooftop, peering out at the city horizon. After a while, it becomes part of her new routine- she even puts a camping chair out there just to spot a glimpse of that orange blob again.

It becomes unhealthy; even a little obsessive. She's not sure what her plan is if she sees it, even. She had some half-baked notion that she was going to shoot her gun and attract some attention; maybe the rider would hear it and stop.

Even she doesn't have much hope.

On a boiling hot Thursday, a few days after the 'sighting', Maka cracks open a can of kidney beans for dinner and mixes it into the rice she's been stirring for around thirty minutes.

"Gourmet," she sighs to herself, clicking off the gas canister after allowing it a few minutes to heat. She then decants the whole culinary disaster onto a white plate and nestles onto the leather couch, clicking the safety on both the handguns on her holster before she sits.

Before she manages to take a bite, she's interrupted from her her meal by the sound of a faint mewling and the feeling of a ball of fluff careening past her leg. "Hey, sweetie," she croons. "Guess you're still hanging about, then?"

She stares at the cat as it rubs past her, a Cheshire grin seemingly plastered onto it's feline features. "You're a bit creepy." Maka giggles, eating a large mouthful of beans but pausing when she realises that the cat is staring intently at her food. "Oh. You're hungry, huh?" Maka considers this for a second or two. "Well, I'm not sure you'll want any of this." She gulps it down. "I'm not sure I do."

The cat has the nerve to look a little disgusted, as if she understands Maka's words, and Maka immediately feels bad, leaning down to give the kitty a scratch behind the ears. "I'll go hunting tomorrow, I promise. Get us some nice meat, ok? For now, I can't give you anything… can't you go find a mouse, or something?"

"_Nya~ I don't like mice~! I want cream_~" the cat replies, before turning it's head the other direction and sauntering away, tail confidently stuck in the air

Maka puts down her fork as she stares.

Her eyes bulge out of her skull for a few seconds and her heartbeat races.

And then, she shakes her head and looks back at her food.

"I'm definitely going mad." She tells herself, holding her fork up to her mouth once more.

She continues to dispassionate chew upon her disappointing dinner.


	4. Chapter 4

Leaving the house used to be so much easier. It used to mean grabbing her bag from the counter, tapping her pockets to check for the big three: wallet, phone, keys. Calling a quick goodbye to her dad and then heading out the door.

These days it took her about an hour to get everything ready. Make sure she was loaded up to the teeth with guns; refilling the cartridges. Checking; double-checking and triple checking the route; and not to mention bringing supplies like food in case she got trapped somewhere. A knife in the sock just in case.

Mental preparation was something else entirely.

"You'd better be worth it, stupid cat," she hisses to the purring black fluffball rubbing past her leg as she tightens her grip on the front door, willing herself to open it. "God. If I die for you…"

And then she opens it.

The sun blinds her immediately and her fingers twitch towards her gun. "Scared of the sun, now, are we?" she mocks herself with a low growl as she makes dash to her car, grasping the keys in one hand as she swings the door open and slides in with the other.

It slams shut next to her and she can't jam the key in the ignition fast enough. The first time she tries, it slips and she swears to herself. Her hands are sweaty, that's all. She's nervous.

Taking a second to breathe, she shakily manages to start up the car and slams her foot on the accelerator the second the engine engages.

"Shit," she breathes outward, half-terror and half-relief that she's made it out of the house today. She drives and drives, not looking back behind her to see if she's being chased or if the creatures were avoiding her today. She figures that she's better off not knowing.

Hunting was always something which soothed her mind, anyway, and Death only knew that she needed it now.

She pulls up at one of her favourite hunting spots- an abandoned town square with weeds growing into the gravel and ivy crawling in all the parked cars and shop windows. The very picture of apocalypse, she thinks.

Deer seemed to flock around this place for some reason, and it was well-lit during the day. Open space, so trees wouldn't impede her view. They were rarely seen here- Maka always figured that perhaps the other animals which were hunting the deer scared them off.

She parks her car and rolls down one window.

And then waits.


	5. Chapter 5

The cat gives her an especially fond look when she shoves a slab of meat down in front of it later that evening. "Here ya go."

The thing must have been starving, judging from the way it tears into the flesh; gulping it back without a second thought. Maka can understand the feeling, too.

She fries a hunk of the stuff up with her gas canister and stirs it into a can of lentils for her dinner. She eats out of the saucepan, hunched over on the kitchen floor, facing her new companion. "Bon appetite," she smiles at the thing. "You'll probably stick around now, won't you?"

The cats mouth distorts into a disgusting smile and Maka backs away a bit. "What's wrong with you, cat?"

"My _name_ is Blair~" the cat purrs in response.

Maka almost chokes on her meat and scrambles up from the floor in a matter of seconds. "W-what? Y-you're…!" she stumbles backwards, wide eyed, and knocks over the gas canister. She stubs her toe in the process. "Ow!"

"Well, _you_ spoke to _me_ first," the cat rolls its eyes and Maka swallows, hard.

"No, no. I _can't_ be losing my mind. Please, no. Not now. I've m-made it this long…" she says to herself, nursing her head in her hands and backing even further from the cat. "Oh God, I'm losing my mind…" she mutters, frantically running a hand through her hair.

"If you say so~!" the cat replies in a sing-song manner.

"Get away from me!" she screams and kicks her saucepan towards it as if it's infected. "I gotta… I gotta get out of here!" she exclaims, running past the cat and grabbing her coat quickly and heading out the door in a flurry.

In her panic she forgets all but one of her guns and the knife stashed in her sock, but even as it occurs to her, all she can do when she gets out the house is run, run, run- as fast and as far as she can along the long stretch of abandoned road. She doesn't even realise until it's too late that she's sobbing loudly.

Loud enough to attract attention.

* * *

She's hopelessly outnumbered.

At first, she holds her own. Pumps round after round of 9mms; spraying fire all around her. Holds them off long enough for her to reload; kills a few more.

She hates looking at them when she shoots. They're too humanoid; it's too uncanny valley. Not quite human, though. Whatever virus broke out made sure to wipe out any and every scrap of humanity from their brains. They just… _looked_ human. Some of them still wore scraggly clothes; walked upright; had hair on their head. One could potentially have mistaken them for humans, if not for the fact that killing was all they knew.

Luckily, Maka knew a bit of that too.

"Shit!" she swears, reloading for a last time as the creatures encroach on her; more and more appearing at the gunfire signals her exact location. "Get off!" she screams at one which claws at her leg. Suddenly she can't get to them fast enough, can't turn in every direction and can't keep running. "Crap, crap!" she repeats, panicking as she realises that she's out of bullets. She manages to knock the one nearest to her- a female- in the head before grabbing the knife from her sock and making a few slashes every which way.

A haggard noise escapes her as they swarm her and she's too tired from slashing, from running. Maka falls to her knees and closes her eyes; her knife slipping from her grip and clattering to the road. She hears the wind whistling loud in her ears as her sight goes blurry; she hears the faint gargle of one the creatures, excited by the opportunity to tear her limb from limb, and finally, she hears the faintest purr of a motorcycle in the distance.

And then she passes out.


	6. Chapter 6

When she wakes up, the first thing that occurs to her is that she must be a zombie. Then, when she wakes up enough to reject that groggy thought, she realises that she must of course be dead.

It was the only explanation, really. She must have died and gone to heaven. Why else would she be in bed, surrounded by comfortably sheets with the smell of freshly made oatmeal permeating her nostrils?

She sits up in bed and a sharp pang hits her in the stomach as a dull thudding hits her in the ears.

"God, I'm starving," she groans, remembering that she forgot to eat lunch and dinner yesterday.

She looks around at her surroundings and realises she's not in a room but in what appears to be in a mattress shop, on one of the trial beds. Every other bed except hers is bare, but hers has soft blankets and pillows on top. "What the hell?" she mumbles, staring in front of her. "Is heaven a mattress shop?" she muses.

She pulls back the covers to see that she's still wearing her scrappy clothes from when she passed out. Coming to her senses, she decides that clearly, someone has found her and moved her here. "Hello?" she calls out loudly and then slaps a hand over her mouth in sudden realisation that she might not be _alone_.

She reaches down for her guns but to her horror she's completely weapon-less. Even her trusty back-up knife is nowhere to be found. As she reaches to check, her arm emits a painful sting and she yelps in pain, examining it.

It's wrapped up in white cloth; a large blood stain just visible as it seeps through from a wound she's apparently sustained. "Hello?" she calls out, louder this time. "If you're going to kill me, just go ahead and do it." She yells out, deciding that it's better to go out with dignity than cowering behind her duvet.

"I'm not gonna kill you," a male voice comes back from somewhere behind her.

In a hot second she's standing upright and out of the bed, ready to fight. With her fists, if necessary. "Who _are_ you?"

A white-haired boy steps out from where he was lurking behind some furniture. "Soul."

"_Soul_?" she replies. "_What_?" She's painfully aware that her screech must be deafening, but right now she's fearing for her life.

"My name." he explains, giving her a strange look. "Soul."

"Well then, _Soul_, would you mind explaining what I'm doing here, and why the hell you were hiding behind those _shelves_?!" she demands.

"Uh… I saved you from a pile of zombies, idiot. And I was just making breakfast."

"Breakfast…? Is it really the morning?" she wonders, distracted from her outrage, rubbing her face in annoyance. "Holy shit, I was out all night?"

"Two nights," he corrects her. "I thought you were a goner, honestly." He says without a trace of emotion; before returning promptly back to his oatmeal-making.

Her knees feel weak and she falls backwards onto the bed with a puff of sheets. "You're kidding…" she swallows, feeling panicked again. "Oh god, Jesus," she closes her eyes as her hands clasp around the sheets. "I'm not usually like this," she tells him, through her teeth. "I don't know what's happening to me."

"Don't worry about it," he shrugs. "You must be hungry. Have some of this."

So she _wasn't_ imagining the oatmeal, then. "Okay."

He steps back behind the shelves for a couple of seconds and returns to her vision clutching a bowl of something which smells amazing, and a spoon. "Here ya go."

It's oatmeal. Actual tasty oatmeal, with sugar scattered on top. It's a huge bowl he's given her, but she wolfs it down in a matter of minutes and even scrapes the dregs from the sides of the bowl with her spoon.

He watches her the entire time, and while she's fully aware of it, she's too hungry to feel discomfort. When she's finally finishes eating, she leans back in the bed and puts her hands on her stomach, groaning. "Oh god, I needed that. Thank you." She opens one eye and stares at him with it. "You're not having any?"

"I only made one lot. Like I said, I didn't know when you were going to wake up. Your head was bleeding a lot, and so was your arm. You're probably concussed."

"Oh." She says, suddenly feeling bad. "Crap."

"No, it's fine. There's enough food here to last a while."

She bites her lip. "How did you make it? You have milk?"

"No, just bottled water, oats and sugar."

She's surprised. "I haven't had any food that isn't canned in ages," she comments. "I… don't go outside much."

He scoffs at her, leaning on a nearby shelving unit. "I'm not surprised, looking at the state I found you in. No food, no car, only one gun? Jesus, I've no idea how you lasted this long."

She's a little embarrassed and a little annoyed. "Like I _said_, I stay inside as much as I can. Yesterday- sorry, two days ago- was… an anomaly, for me." She tries to explain, but she's not sure how she can.

"Sure," he shrugs uncaringly. "You still hungry?" he nods towards her bowl and she blinks back at him.

"Yeah, actually,"

"Cool. I'll grab something."

"W-wait, Soul!" she stops him as he's about to head off. "Um. Where are we?" she looks around.

"A Wal-Mart in someplace called Eastbourne Park."

"A… Wal-Mart?"

"Best places to hang out in. Got loads of supplies and they lock up real secure." He sighs. "Jesus. That's apocalypse 101. Where have you _been_?"

"I… I don't know," she admits. "Eastbourne…? Are we…?"

"Couple of miles from where I found you. We're still in Colorado, don't worry." He nods, seeming a little bored by the conversation. "Look, I'm gonna get something for me to eat. What do you want to eat?"

She blinks up at him. "Uh…"

"Meat? Beans? More oats?" he snaps. "It looks like this supermarket didn't get raided too bad when it all hit. There's not enough left to stay forever, though."

She's struck by how impatient he is. "Meat?" she wonders. "You have _meat_?"

"Uh, no. But I can _get_ some." He stares into the middle distance for a second and then his focus snaps back to her. "Just get some rest, ok? You've been asleep for so long, your muscles will be weak. I'll be back in about half an hour."

"Okay." She nods a little meekly. "But in the meantime, I'm gonna need my gun back."

He rolls his eyes, "We couldn't be safer here," he informs her. "Besides, your gun was empty. I left it back where I found you," He explains. "But take mine, if it'll clear your mind." He tosses her a gun she recognizes as a Colt M1911 and a case of ammo. "You gotta promise not to shoot me, though." He shoots her a grin before he stands up and looks around. It's the first real flicker of humor he's showed since they met ten minutes ago.

She loads it up and clicks on the safety, tucking it into her belt. "Thanks."

She watches him closely until he's completely out of her eyesight. After all, she knew that the number one rule of the apocalypse was that you couldn't trust _anybody_.

Especially if they were nice to you.


	7. Chapter 7

As if by clockwork, or very careful planning, he returns at exactly half an hour from when he set off. While he's gone, Maka cycles through thinking that she must be in a dream, to thinking that she's lost her mind, to believing in her white-haired captor again, to thinking that she's dreaming again.

It's a little exhausting after the fourth time she's changed her mind, so when he rears his head again she's a little relieved that she has a definitive answer.

"You're back." she tells him sullenly, unsure even herself why she feels so cranky. "Where did you go," she asks, tonelessly.

"Hunting," he replies gruffly, before presenting an unidentifiable carcass of meat to her. He's not unlike a cat, proudly showing it's owner a bird it's caught in the back yard.

"You already _skinned_ it?" she asks, genuinely curious and a little impressed. "That was fast. It takes me a while, usually."

"Oh, uh…." He shrugs. "I'm good with knives," he gives her a grimace, showcasing a mouthful of razor-sharp pearly whites. Despite herself, Maka takes a hissed gasp in through her teeth.

"Y-your teeth!" she exclaims.

Any trace of mirth on his face disappears quickly and he covers his mouth with his hand. "Sorry," he mutters furtively. "Born like it."

She realises with a little jolt that this strange albino boy in front of her that skins rabbits in under 20 minutes and undoubtedly saved her life from a hoard of zombies just so happens to be _self-conscious_. "Uh, well. It suits you."

He snorts derisively as if he couldn't possibly believe this and begins to chew on a small lump of meat he picks off from the carcass, staying careful to keep his teeth out of sight.

Maka reaches over to grab some and he stops her.

"Let me cook it first," he insists.

She wonders why he didn't mind so much when it came to his own meal but decides not to ask the question. He already seems so irritated by her chattiness; and far be it from her to piss off the only person she's spoken to in about a year.

They silently watch eat chunk of ambiguous meat sizzle in the makeshift cooking receptacle as he throws them in, one by one. It's more awkward than it should be; Maka notices. She wonders why. When the world had essentially ended, why should social niceties matter to anyone?

"So, uh." She begins to ask, breaking the ice. "What's your story, then?"

He shrugs. "It's not important."

She feels a surge of anger rise up inside her and scowls at him. "You're the first person I've actually had the chance to talk to in a year and it's not _important_? Who the hell do you think you are?!" she rants. "You have no idea how lonely it's been. You have no idea how long I've… how long I've…" she begins to lose her speech a bit as a big lump of emotion forms in her throat. "Why did you even rescue me if you aren't interested in company?"

Soul seems a little taken aback by the question and even has the good grace to look abashed, but he's not entirely sure how to answer her. "Sorry," he mutters. "Look, my background isn't… it's not something I want to talk about." He pauses, feeling the heavy tension hanging in the air and trying awkwardly to smooth it over. "Why don't you just tell me about you, for now."

Maka sighs and unintentionally rolls her eyes a little. "Well, for starters… my name's Maka. Maka Albarn, daughter of Spirit and Kami… I'm from Maryland, originally. I was visiting some friends in Colorado when… when it happened. I've been stuck here ever since. I didn't much fancy travelling around," she muses. It's odd, recounting her life like this. It doesn't come naturally to her. "I've basically survived from hopping from home to home and not looking back."

"Ok…"

"I was with a group of people, for a while. They all got turned. Now, it's been a year." She says bluntly.

Soul nods vaguely. "I know _that_ story," he shudders, pulling a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and placing one in his mouth. Maka mouth quirks sideways and she gives him a look.

"You're smoking indoors?"

He looks blankly back at her and then around at his surroundings; the Wal-Mart now decrepit and covered with ivy and moss. She has to laugh. "Okay, good point."

"You want one?"

Maka doesn't usually smoke, but given everything that's happened in the last 48 hours, she finds herself reaching over and taking one from him.

"Thanks," she takes a lighter out of his outstretched hand and fumbles around with it with her thumb for a few seconds, failing to light her cigarette. "Can you tell I don't do this often?"

He obligingly reaches over and lights it for her. "Now breathe in," he instructs. "There."

Maka barely holds back her cough and Soul laughs. "Didn't think I'd be the one indoctrinating somebody else into this anytime. I don't do it so much now, but I used to…" he glazes over, and Maka can see he's far away. "Anyway. You were telling me about you." He corrects.

"That's it."

"That's not it," he frowns. "Who were you?" he waits a second, and when she looks blankly back at him, he makes a face. "Occupation, likes, dislikes… hobbies…"

"Maka Albarn…" she screws up her nose and tries to think back to who she was before she was just nothing, survivor#203. "Uh… I was a waitress, at an Italian restaurant. I was studying for my Law exams. I liked running, and tennis. I liked books, and libraries."

"You wanna tell me how some scrawny book-happy Law student survived three years of this post-apocalyptic wasteland?"

Maka rolls her eyes and folds her arms self-consciously over her chest, glaring at him. "To hell with you!" she scowls. "I don't need to stay here if you're going to be a colossal ass."

He shrugs and looks down at his lap, taking in a big gulp of smoke and exhaling through his nostrils. "I've got a point, don't I?"

"I was… a runner. And my dad… was a bit of a survivalist. I grew up in a rural area; he was forever teaching me how to live in the woods, how to live off the fat of the land, how to shoot and how to hunt," she shakes her head. "That's how I survived." She scowls at him. "How did some… weird Shark-tooth _emo_ kid manage to survive the virus, then?"

He laughs at her feeble attempt at insulting him and leans back onto a nearby bed. "Well, that's a more easily answered question." He takes a drag, leaving her in suspense while she waits for his answer. "I'm immune."


	8. Chapter 8

"Well, how do you know that you're immune?" she asks, after a short and intensely surprised silence befalls them. "How can you possibly know that?"

He holds back from rolling his eyes and doesn't reply except to pull at the collar of his shirt until his entire right shoulder is exposed. There, Maka traces the bumps of not one, but two faintly visible bite marks residing on the skin there. "O-oh." She pales and takes a step back.

"Relax, nerd. If I was one of them I'd be trying to eat you already."

"B-but… how?"

He shrugs. "Heck if I know. I guess it's just one of those things. In my blood." He sighs and flicks his cigarette to one side. I guess I should consider myself lucky. But… I mean, they can still kill me. They just can't turn me into one. So all it _really_ means is that I have a little longer to play with if I ever do get caught." He pauses in his speech and gives her a look. "Which… doesn't happen often."

She bites her lip and he lets go of his collar. "Can't imagine what it must have been like when you got bitten. You must have been so nervous."

"Well, yeah." He waves a hand, and Maka gets a strong sense that he doesn't want to speak about it.

She's curious about something which occurs to her. "If your blood is immune, then doesn't that mean…!"

"The cure? Relax. I'm fairly certain that whatever is keeping me from being turned, it's genetic. There's no magical cure in my blood, or whatever. Besides…" he stares grimly out of the window as he speaks. "Have you seen them, recently? There's no way a 'cure' exists. They're too far gone. That virus, it totally melts your brain."

"Well, don't you think that it could protect those of us who are still human, then?"

"I'd need to find someone who really understand how it works, and they're all _dead_."

"Th-that's not necessarily the case-"

"It _is_." He spits, suddenly angry.

"Well… sorry." She eventually says after a protracted silence, his shouted words ringing off the walls around them.

"It's fine," he mutters, a little embarrassed. He blows smoke out his mouth, politely turning away from Maka to do so.

"If you really believe everyone is dead," she wonders, pausing. "How have you managed to stay _sane_ in all that time?"

"I didn't, always," he regards her a little warily, thinking hard about what she's just said. "It'd been about a year for you, huh? Is that what that was? Me finding you, without any guns, nothing… was that suicide?"

She shakes her head and swallows. "W-well, no." she stutters. "I just… I lost my mind. I'm not so sure I've found it yet, to be honest with you."

"Lost your _mind_?"

"Started to hallucinate." She clarifies, figuring that she might as well be honest with him, if they were the last two people left in the world. "…my _cat_ started talking to me…"

He splutters but to her immense surprise, he doesn't laugh. Instead, he looks wide-eyed at her and frowns. "What did the cat look like?"

"Uh… nothing special. Just a black cat…"

"What did it say?"

She frowns, trying to remember. "Something about… something about its… _her_ name. I can't remember, sorry. I was kinda bugging out, at the time. It asked for… some cream, maybe?" she shakes her head. "Jeez, why does it matter? It was in my head. I'm not crazy, you know. I just… I've been on my own for so long."

He scratches his head. Maka's struggling to read his facial expression, but it's clear that he's hiding something. "Your cat, huh?" he seems deep in thought. "Back at the place you were staying at?"

She looks at him blankly. "Um. Yes… why?"

He clears his throat and stands up. "I think we should get out of here." He turns away from her and picks up a green army jacket from the floor beside him. "Quickly."

* * *

She's not used to it, not by a long shot. Having someone around, again. It's been a whole year since she's even interacted with another human and about two since it was someone competent; someone who wasn't going to get her killed at the drop of a hat.

Beggars couldn't be choosers, but she can't help but wish for more entertaining company,

Surly and mysterious, those were two words which summed up Soul in a nutshell. He still got fidgety whenever she asked about his past and had yet to provide her with any _substantial_ information about where he was planning to go, either.

It was as if he didn't fully trust her, something she doesn't really hold against him. They'd both been to some strange and bad places in this new world, seen things that you couldn't easily forget. It was hard to trust anybody fully, these days.

And… well, he'd been right about hanging out in a supermarket. This really was the comfortable life.

Take right now, for example. Yesterday she'd been unconscious, getting scoured by fifty-off zombies and today she's scoffing prawn cocktail flavoured crisps with her feet dangling off the edge of the five-storey staircase.

Soul hangs behind her a little way, heating his hands up on his gas stove- currently bubbling over with water for, as far as she can see, a pot of pudding rice. She finds her gaze lingering on him for a little while longer than necessary, sizing him up now that she's no longer starving nor in immediate danger.

The first things that stick out about him are the red eyes, the razor sharp teeth- and of course, the ivory hair. He's got a formidable exterior, that's for sure, but she can't help but think it suits him- in a rugged sort of way.

He catches her staring and sends her a strange look.

"What?" he glares a little and she recoils. "I'm just making rice." He snaps. "There was none of the normal stuff left, only this gloopy crap." He demonstrates the undesirable texture as he wrestles to get the stuff from sticking onto the wooden spoon.

"You know, you're kind of scary looking," she tells him, in what she hopes in an informative manner.

He scowls deeper and concentrates harder on his rice. "Just what every boy dreams of hearing."

She realises too late that she's managed to offend him _again_ and she tries to backtrack almost immediately. "Oh… no. I don't mean… you're not ugly. You're the opposite of that. You're handsome…? I mean, isn't it good to look scary, especially these days… I mean, what am I…?"

"Stop talking," he interrupts her and she's actually grateful.

"Sorry," she says quietly and the glimmer of a smirk appears on his features. "What?!" she squawks in indignation at his clear amusement. "It's not funny!"

"Were you _always_ like this, or was it the isolation?" he asks. His tone is so laid-back that it takes her a second or two to even clock that he's insulting her.

Go figure.

"What are you doing with that?" she points at his rice, changing the subject, and he blinks, surprised by the rapid about-turn in stone. Leaning behind him somewhat, he pulls out a green, flat packet of something.

"I'm making sushi. I found nori in one of the stock cupboards. Apparently whoever raided this place didn't realise it was food."

She snorts. "Don't blame them. It's _hardly_ food." Maka frowns. "Why go through the trouble? There's loads of instant food…"

Soul shrugs and turns the heat off the stove, stirring once more for good measure. "I've always found that when you're travelling alone for a long period, the little things keep you sane," he says in a quiet tone. He's met with silence, only broken by the tearing of his nori wrapper.

"Pity there's no sashimi," Maka smiles, a little struck by Soul's sudden soft side. "You could always try your luck fishing…"

"I've no idea if the lakes are infected or not. I'd wager yes. I've no idea if this virus is even _airborne_, though I doubt it- considering that you're still _you_, and not a brainless killing machine." He pops a wrapped rice roll into his mouth and makes a face. "Hmm…" he fingers the packet of nori, clearly searching for an expiry date. "Not bad. Not great either."

"Is that right? Can I try some?"

"Sure thing. Grab a sheet and just wrap it around the rice, like this…" he starts to explain but she makes a face at him.

"I'm half Japanese, I know how to do it," she grumbles, and then snorts at his over-offended huff. "Sorry, sorry." She grimaces at him. "I guess I'm not used to… just hanging out, like this."

Soul smiles like it couldn't possibly matter and scratches his head. "You know, it's been about a week since I've actually had a bath."

"A week!" she squeaks, envious. "I don't even remember the last time I cleaned myself," she admits, a little embarrassed. "How do you…?"

"Ah, um. There's a lake a few hours from here. I can take you today, if you want."

Maka's heart thuds in her chest and she frowns. "No, I really can't… I don't want to be outside. Not after what happened,"

"Relax," he shrugs. "I can protect you."

Maka has absolutely no reason to trust him when he says that- but something about the confidence in his tone convinces her to agree, albeit with a little flicker of nerves in her chest.


	9. Chapter 9

**This is for my reviewer who complained about the shorter chapters! (You're right, I do need to make 'em longer)**

* * *

He doesn't talk a lot, her new companion. He also doesn't seem to do a lot of planning; not the kind she's used to. Hell, there've been times that she's caught him trying to leave the base without any weapon at all.

She's not sure why he's alive, and he wonders the same thing about her.

They spend the following few days just existing around each other. Finding scraps of food and basically recovering from her ordeal consumes Maka's entire life. It's odd how fast she finds her mind becoming sharper; less stressed, now that she's able to have regular human interaction.

Soul, conversely, wakes up early so he can go and hunt.

He usually returns in the late hours of the evening with something for them to eat. Maka can't count the days very well but if she had to guess, she would have said it was three days after Soul saved her life that it happened – he came back from wherever his excursions took him with a stressful sense of urgency and nothing to show for it.

The back door had slammed closed as he'd kicked it that way. "Maka," he had called, and somehow, she had just known. Something about his tone told her that it wasn't safe here for them anymore.

You couldn't stay anywhere forever. They followed you; they could smell human blood.

She hadn't even asked, she'd sighed and said "How long do we have?"

With a grimace, he shakes his head. "We gotta go, _now."_

* * *

They don't pack heavy, just a few cans of beans and some bottled water shoved in a backpack along with all their weaponry. She doesn't even get to say goodbye to the place before Soul's effectively bustled her still-injured ass into the back of a jeep he's apparently discovered, commandeered and hot-wired.

Sneaking out the back gives the perfect viewpoint of a hoarde of feral infected humans successfully beat their way through half an inch of glass with nothing but a baseball bat.

The apocalypse was terrifying, she realises- and not for the first time.

They're currently speeding their way down leafy suburban Denver in stony silence, driving past the overgrown roads; the dilapidated, empty houses. The bodies; both human and zombie. The abandoned cars that scatter all over the roads; a jigsaw of suffering and misery.

"I don't know where you're driving, but my place is way back that way," she cranes her neck to look through the rear-view mirror at the other end of the road. "And I liked it there."

Soul barely even reacts with his face but shakes his head in a firm manner.

"Well, where are we going now?"

"We're going to find somewhere else we can hang out for a few days. Maybe longer. Then we'll move on again."

"And what's the long-term aim?"

"For you? To recover enough from your injury so that me leaving you isn't a death sentence." He tells her bluntly, and she draws a sharp, surprised breath inward.

"Why don't you tell me what you really think?" she scowls as his open apathy and then wiggles her bandaged arm in the arm. "Anyway, I've dealt with worse than this scrape.."

"I don't doubt it. Unfortunately, my conscience doesn't really think that way." He shrugs, half-apology and half-statement of fact. As he says it, he eyes her bandaged arm from the corner of his vision and makes a quiet noise of discontent. "It's been a while since that's been changed."

Maka rolls her eyes. "I was first aid trained, before this crap."

"Really?" Soul asks, not budging his eyes from the road. "How come?" he asks tonelessly.

She decides to indulge herself by answering anyway, but only because she's bored and she has no idea how long the journey will be. "I told you, my father was a survivalist. He worked for some… some branch of the secret service, for a long time. I wasn't really allowed to know anything about it. It's how he met my mother."

"Huh," Soul replies, uninquisitive.

"What about your parents? What did they do?" she asks leaning on the window and turning to face her chauffeur.

"My father was a composer, and my mother was an opera singer."

"Wow!" she exclaims. "What a _meet cute_!" she finds herself gushing, a little uncharacteristically.

"A… a what?" he demands. "What is that?"

"You know. In a story where two people meet and fall in love. The way they first meet. It's a meet cute."

Soul chuckles a little at her clear nerdiness. "_Jesus_, you're a dork."

"Who _hurt_ you?!" she wails and it's his turn to roll his eyes.

"Nobody. My parents weren't particularly in love, and they definitely weren't cute."

That put an end to that conversation abruptly. As the vast expanse of silence unfurls before them, Maka twiddles her thumbs and her eyes begin to follow along with the trees that sway in the autumn breeze.

It's a pleasant time of year, and all the leaves on the trees are turning brown and falling off. Colorado is cold year-round, but it didn't mean that they didn't have beautiful falls.

She ponders how lovely this all would be if it weren't for the implicit destruction, and the looming threat of death.

They drive for what feels like days but is probably more like an hour, and as soon as she begins to drift away into blissful sleep, Soul pulls up somewhere and the car comes to a shuddering stop in some god-forsaken grove, on a patch of wild grass.

"Okay, now I'm convinced that you're going to kill me." She half-smiles.

"You're still delirious," he tells her, and she laughs, not helping her case. "There's a lake here. It should be pretty clean."

She gets out of the car a little curiously and looks around her, following Soul as he wades through a few branches of willow and bush to reveal a small and rather blue-looking lake. It's like some sort of oasis in the desert; and Maka's eyes almost well up with tears just looking at the thing.

"I can… I can get in?"

"I came here before. I remembered it. It's uninfected." He grins at her face of ardent glee as her shirt, jeans, shoes and socks come off- not necessarily in that order.

Clad only in a white vest and some very boring black underwear, she all but leaps into the water, emerging a second later with bits of kelp dangling from her hair and a content sigh escaping her lips. "Oh, this is great."

Soul smirks at her. "Glad you're enjoying it. You're not going to enjoy this next part very much."

She frowns as he disappears from behind the hedgerow and rummages through his car for something for a few seconds, emerging again holding a small backpack, his gun now safely tucked into the back of his pants.

"What's that?" she points at the bag and he grimaces.

"You're gonna find out real soon."

He also strips out of his jeans and jacket without even a shade of embarrassment. When all your friends and family were dead, it was hard to feel such puny, stupid emotions like embarrassment. He carefully leaves his gun next to his clothes – in plain sight – and hauls the backpack into the water with him, out of it pulling a large bottle of vodka.

"Just my luck, first person I find in years and he's an alcoholic," she bristles.

He clenches his jaw and gives her a sideways look. "It's to disinfect your arm, smartass. And it's going to hurt."

She offers him her hand with a little trembling, and he takes it, carefully unwrapping his own handiwork on the cloth wrapped around her wound. "You gonna faint, nerd-face?"

"Pfft," she scowls. "Give me a little credit."

It is a pretty gruesome sight. She hadn't realised how deep the cut was, or how gnarly it looked. What really gets her, though, is how clean it's cut. It's like she's been sliced by a sharpened blade of some sort; not a weapon usually reserved for zombies.

"It looks better," he comments drily.

"Jesus, how bad did it look before?"

He laughs at this, but then he hands her a strip of cloth and asks her bite down on it as he pours and dabs the vodka into the gash.

Words can't describe.

She hears her own hoarse screaming into the cloth as tears of nothing but sheer pain blind her, the beating sting taking away her entire left side.

"Hey, good job, almost done," he tells her as he quickly rewraps her aching limb as she tries her very best not to moan and sob. After the layer of cloth, he wraps it in duct tape. "Waterproof." He says gruffly, after she looks inquisitively at him. "See, look. Done."

"Oh, God…" she swallows the pain as he hands her back her successfully dressed arm, biting down on her lip.

"Now… this," he hands her the rest of the bottle of vodka. It's the first shred of sympathy he's thrown her since they've known each other, and she's grateful.

Even more grateful, still, for the clear liquid which burns her throat but numbs the rest of her pain. "Ah," she breathes, after a heavy gulp which makes her grimace. "Thanks. You, uh. You want some?"

He smiles. "Thought you'd never ask," he takes the bottle from her and also swigs some back. She watches him afterwards – he doesn't have any sort of extraneous reaction to the poisonous liquid. He's used to this, she thinks. More so than her, anyway.

Not for the first time, she wonders what he's gone through to get here.

He reaches into his bag and finds himself a bar of soap. "Swiped this before we left. It's uh…" he sniffs with a little disapproval. "Lavender. Better than nothing?"

"Better than sweat."

"Better than dirt."

"Better than _blood_."

"Here, here," he holds up the soap and begins to scrub himself all over as Maka lowers herself down into the blissful lake, not even pausing for a second to realise how cold it is. Even Soul, she doesn't fail to notice, manages to let out a seemingly held sigh of contentment at the feeling of the water, and the soap, and the peacefulness of it all.

For the first time since he saved her life, she takes a good, hard look at him.

When you got over how jarring his more… _prominent_ features were, he was a good-looking man. She guessed he was maybe a few years older than her… twenty-five, perhaps? The white hair and stubble admittedly threw her off, but he looked young.

He was muscular but very skinny, apocalypse skinny. It's a body type Maka possesses herself; the sort of body type you develop when you can only eat when it's safe, when your only options sometimes made it preferable just to skip a meal.

One could only take so much fried rat and out-of-date canned green beans.

He seems to notice the eyes on himself and shoots her an inquisitive look. "You okay?"

"Yeah," she smiles, biting her lip. Sometimes it was better not to tell people what you were thinking, she'd learned. It was almost awkward having to re-learn her social graces now that she had someone to socialise with. "My arm feels… better. I'm sure it'll be healed up soon."

"That's good," he nods, handing her the bar of soap, which she accepts with glee, scrubbing as much of herself all over as she can with only one workable arm. Flipping her head over to wash her hair, the soap slips out of her available hand and she swears, reaching down to pick it up from where it's plopped into the water before it sinks. "Uh…" she starts a little awkwardly. "You wouldn't mind… helping? It's just… I can't really do this properly…"

He blinks, surprised, but to his credit doesn't seem embarrassed. "Sure."

"Just my hair. Just… lather a bit on your hands and then-"

"I know how to wash hair, idiot." He scowls and takes the already thinning bar from her slippery hands. "Just bend over."

"I don't know _your_ life, but I've never actually washed my hair with a bar of lavender soap in a lake in the middle of nowhere with one arm before?" she snaps, a little irritated at how blunt he can be.

To her surprise he raises his hands up defensively and laughs. "Okay, okay. Got your point. Lean over, here I'll do it," he instructs, and she does so, feeling just a little vindicated.

She notes that snapping at him makes him more polite, then. These things were always good to know.

There's something oddly enjoyable about having his hands scrub soap into her scalp. Perhaps it was the total lack of physical contact she'd experienced in the last year or so, but right now- she could die happy at his fingertips.

"Oh, that's _good_," she lets out a moan.

He laughs. "I don't know whether to feel weird that you're enjoying it this much."

"Just don't stop," she leans further into his hands. "Use your nails."

That makes him laugh. "Is that a normal thing? My girlfriend used to like head massages, too. Especially with nails," he pauses. "I always thought it was because she was a-" he stops and pauses, thinking about his next words.

"Because she was…?"

"…oh, she was just odd, that's all," he concludes, awkward skirting the topic.

"What was she like?" Maka asks.

"Oh, uh." He seems sheepish. "Don't worry about that."

It was admittedly hard to worry when his She notes that he doesn't want to talk about his ex-girlfriend, and idly finds herself wondering if they broke up or if something worse had happened to her.

Something zombie related.


	10. Chapter 10

They drive and drive after that; at times it feels like they've been on the road for hours. Large portions of it is spent in silence as Maka watches the trees and the hedgerows pass them on their way to the next town over; some of it is spent sniffing her hair and admiring just how clean she suddenly is. Maka was finding that out when you haven't showered in almost a year, one bath could really do a number on your hair.

After about an hour Soul decides he's sick of silence and with one hand on the steering wheel, begins to rummage through the collection of CD's in the car. "Can you see anything good?" he asks her.

"Depends on your definition of good," she grimaces, spying a disc that promises to be chock-a-block with 'your favorite 80s hits!'. Eyeing up Soul, she decides that he's probably not into 80's cheese and finds a Coldplay CD instead. "There's this," she takes the disc out carefully and inserts it into the CD player. One of their songs blares out the speaker and Soul grimaces.

"_Really_?"

"I like Coldplay!" Maka insists. "They're pretty good."

Soul stays silent on the matter, but he purses his lips and doesn't mention the music again until they stop driving.

When leafy highways turn into suburban residential estates, Soul slows and they eventually crawl to a halt by a large shopping mall, named 'Boulder Village Shopping'. He parks his Jeep right by the entrance to the place and looks over at Maka. "This will do for tonight. There will probably be a few supplies, and we're not too far into the city." He looks around. "I'm gonna check it out. You stay here, take my gun."

She does so cautiously. "Wait! What are you taking?"

"Don't worry, I've… got something else."

Maka blinks at him like he's a bit stupid and he rolls his eyes, turning away from her. She feels a pang of anxiety as she watches him disappear into the entrance.

* * *

He's gone for a long time. Longer than he has any right to leave her all alone and unattended in a random car park in an unfamiliar, probably zombie-ridden part of Colorado. She starts to lose faith that he's ever coming back, and then her heart leaps into her chest as she spies something in the opposite direction.

It's one of them. Only one, and it's pretty slow- but it's definitely ambling towards the van.

She swears under her breath. If it makes a noise, others might come, too. "Crap, shit, fuck… go away, please go away." She breathes. It doesn't seem to respond to her requests, getting closer and closer. As it approaches, Maka can see that it used to be a blonde girl; not that it was anymore.

Maybe it wouldn't be so aggressive on account of being a younger girl? There was some logic in that, Maka supposes.

It bares its dirty, yellowed and pointed teeth as it makes definitive eye contact with Maka and she swears and prays all at the same time.

"Okay, fine. We're doing this," she whispers to herself as encouragement. She rolls down her window and aims her gun as quickly as she can, training it on the zombie before it starts moving rapidly.

One shot.

Bang.

Zombie girl lying dead on the road. Her grey flesh sagging against her dead, sunken eyes. Maka can't stomach to look at them for too long, even dead.

Maka's heartbeat is the only noise left in the parking lot, and as her eyes buzz around her- it speeds up.

A peep from the bushes, but not a peep from the mall.

"Soul, come back," Maka finds herself begging to herself, stomach now dropping as the bushes to the left of the parking lot rustle and two- no, three- bigger, heftier male zombies pop out. "Shit," she chokes and wonders if her gun is in range. She figures- probably not, and decides to get out the car with her weapon in tow.

Getting out of her car arouses attention and the three zombies now focus on her completely.

Bang, bang, bang.

One misses, gets him in the leg. She tries again,

Bang!

All dead now.

She prays that Soul will be back in a minute, there's no way she has enough ammo left in his gun for another fifteen of the damn things.

She can't get back in the car, too noisy. Now is the time for being utterly silent.

She couldn't just drive off, because then what would Soul do?

She doesn't hear anything else for a good twenty seconds, and her muscles begin to relax- maybe there wasn't any more of them in hearing range.

A noise behind her makes her yelp out and whip her head round, holding up her gun and aiming at the potential threat.

Soul frowns. "It's me," he says. "It's safe, follow me."

She scuttles after him as he welcomes her into the medium-sized, echoing shopping mall her shoes now tapping annoyingly on the stone flooring between shops. There was something unapologetically eerie about the abandoned place- with the shops all smashed in, the places mostly looted; the escalators in perpetual stillness and moss climbing up all the walls.

"You're sure it's safe?"

"Yes."

"How come it took so long?" she sends him a look. "It was scary out there."

"I'm sorry. I ran into trouble, and when that was dealt with, I did a double check," he says doubtfully. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah, I'm fine. I just… I didn't hear a shot or anything. How did…?" she references his apparent lack of armory.

"I don't always use guns," he waves her away and she frowns, confused.

How could you possibly kill a zombie with any other weapon other than a gun, she wonders to herself. And she didn't exactly see any knives on him, either.

Not for the first time, her suspicion of him grows. There was _something_ he wasn't telling her, something he was hiding, and there was a reason why.

She spies a dead zombie on the floor, guts slipping out from his putrid stomach, and puts it to rest for the minute, focusing instead on the matter at hand.

"So, uh," she frowns. "What are we _doing_ here?"

"Finding some food? Not sure about you, but I'm hungry." He stops walking to check out a nearby map. "I definitely passed a Costco when I was casing it. Let's check it out?"

"Sounds like a plan," she smiles, knowing that she won't be able to eat anything at all.


	11. Chapter 11

There's a camping shop in the mall, so her priority is to make up some bedding while Soul goes to scope out the Costco to see if he can find anything to make any sort of food with.

She's hesitant at first to go anywhere on her own, but while she doesn't entirely trust her new companion, he trusts him enough that she knows he's thorough – every zombie that was ever in this place is now gone or dead.

It's spooky, in a way. Maka doesn't mind – in fact, she prefers a touch of spook over actively life-threatening situations, luckily.

She doesn't find any sleeping bags. It looks like the mall has been looted badly – probably at the point of initial outbreak. Most places were, unfortunately. Supplied ran low in many areas. Maka wonders how Soul's getting on with searching for food.

She finds a small home supplies store and grabs about four duvet covers and a pile of pillows, chucking the haul into an abandoned shopping cart with a dodgy wheel. It keeps her amused for at least a little while, the pretence of just a normal day out at the mall, loading up her cart.

He was right about that, she thinks. Small moments of joy kept you sane in this world. Soul, cooking himself a poor man's version of post-apocalyptic sushi just for a bit of excitement. Listening to Coldplay in the car for hours. This stupidity.

What the purpose of life after the apocalypse?

For years, it had been survival, survival, survival.

Now, survival didn't seem like enough. She's not sure what's changed. Maybe it was the fact that her mind had started to turn on her; that she couldn't even trust her own thoughts anymore; her own sights.

_A talking cat._

She finds herself pondering whether life before the apocalypse really had meaning, either. Or whether it was just social pressure that dictated why and how people went about their daily business. _What do you do when that social pressure doesn't exist?_

"Maka," she hears a gruff voice from a bearded albino man that appears in front of her, and nearly jumps out of her skin. "_Maka_!"

"W-what!?" she squeaks, having been effectively thrown from her existential reverie and back into the harsh real world. "I was just…" she looks around her and realises that she's staring into the distance clutching a shopping trolley full of pillows, having not achieved very much.

He gives her a strange glance and frowns. "Is everything okay?" he asks, all concerned. His concern starts spreading to her quicker than anticipated.

"What? What happened? What did I do? I don't remember anything…"

"You were…" he chooses his words carefully. "Out of it. Sit down, here. I'll get you some water."

Her breath speeds up as he gets up to leave and she clutches onto his sleeve, hands suddenly trembling without control.

"No, no, no. You can't leave me, I'll die! NO!"

He stops and holds her shoulders gently. "Okay, okay." His voice turns gentle. "Just sit down." He grabs a pillow from the cart and firmly guides her so she's in a sitting position.

"Don't leave," she whispers, hoarsely, lucid at least enough to feel embarrassed.

"I'm not going to leave," he tells her. "Okay, just relax. It's okay. Talk me through what's wrong."

She breathes in once; rapidly; and out again. "My mind… I'm losing my mind…"

"You're not losing your mind, you're just freaked out." he says gently, rubbing her shoulder. "Hey, Maka. Look at me," he instructs, and she slowly raises her line of vision to make eye contact with him.

For the strangest reason, his glowing red eyes are a calming force.

"Listen. You're safe; we're safe. I checked the building, I'm protecting you. Nothing's going to happen to you now," he continues to reassure her.

She nods tearfully. "What if I'm losing it…?" she repeats.

"You're panicked, you're not thinking straight."

She nods, hanging onto his every word. His voice is relaxing. "Keep talking," she tells him, her own voice cracking stressfully. "Just… talk. It's helping."

"Okay, uh…" he hesitates. "A-about…?"

"Doesn't matter. Anything. Please," she requests again, her hands still shuddering as her heartbeat skyrockets.

He blinks. "Okay. Uh… I'll talk about music. Music…" he runs a hand through his hair. "Fortissimo, that's Italian for loud. Pianissimo; very quiet. All these terms are in Italian, I don't know why. I think it's because they sound fancy and musicians are all pretentious assholes. There are not many Italian composers I'd rate, but what do I know… okay, uh… Rubato means gradual slowing or speeding up of a pace for effect. Like if you were playing an intense part, then you might speed up for effect, that's rubato…." He pauses. "I play serialistic jazz, that's what my brother would call it. My mother would call it a disgrace to classical music as a genre…" he garbles on, getting a little lost in his train of thought.

"What's serialistic jazz?"

"Uh, it's a style of jazz where key signature and tempo is largely ignored. It's very freeform. If you didn't like music much you might think it sounds discordant, and I guess it is. I just… I think there's a form of art to it."

"Key signature?" she asks breathlessly.

"So… whether a piece starts in C, or A, or D…. et cetera," he pauses. "That's an oversimplification," he continues, but as he eyes up Maka's calming demeanour, he half-smiles. "Oh, who gives a damn." He swallows. "Is this helping?"

She nods frantically. "Uh-huh." She pauses to think. "You play piano?"

"I played piano. And guitar, and a fair bit of violin… my brother is… _was_ a famous violinist, before he died." He takes in a breath. "He played with the California Philharmonic… it was his whole career."

"And you? What was your job?"

He clears his throat and considers this. "I worked… for the military."

She feels herself much calmer now, able to concentrate on the room around her. Whatever had happened to her brain seemed to be fading and she's sitting up straight. Out of genuine curiosity she asks: "Which branch?"

He can clearly tell that she's feeling better because his gentler bedside manner reverts to his usual gruff self; as he shrugs. "Does it matter?" he fishes a cigarette box from his pocket and lights up, looking away from her.

She thinks that it's a weird answer but figures that he's probably sick of talking about himself already. "Thank you, Soul. I feel a lot better." She reaches out and squeezes his non-smoking hand. "Sorry I made you talk."

"Sorry about the monologue.."

"It was interesting," she smiles. "I only wish I knew anything about music."

He blinks at her hand, still on his, and looks away- taking his hand with him. "You should get some sleep. I'll keep lookout for a bit, okay?"

She's almost unconscious by the time he finishes his sentence.

"That boring, huh," she faintly hears him whisper under his breath as her eyes close and she curls up into a fetal position, her knees tucked neatly under her chin.

* * *

She wakes up hours later and finds that he's propped a pillow underneath her head, and found a few blankets to cover her with.

He's still sitting there, awake next to her.


	12. Chapter 12

She notices him letting down his guard around her, the week or so that they stay at the mall. During the day, they find stupid games to play to kill the time.

On the second day, she finds a whole bunch of black sharpies and draws a giant chess board on the middle of the white floors in the food court. On the third day, she finds one item each corresponding to one chess piece, and sets out the game – which involves locating 16 ceramic pots for pawns, things like display cabinets for rooks, 2 dead potted plants for the king and – this she's most proud of – 2 small white dragon statues for horses.

Soul takes one look at her efforts and raises an eyebrow quizzically. "You do realise that playing this game is going to give us both a hernia dragging around the heavier pieces, right?"

She ignores him.

On day 4 she destroys him at chess.

"Nerd," he tells her.

"Idiot." She quips straight back. "Although, at least you knew the rules. Rematch tomorrow?"

"Maybe," he chuckles. "I think taking your bishop threw my back out…" he complains, grabbing it for dramatic effect.

She grins. "Maybe we can play checkers, instead."

* * *

On day 5, Soul decides he's stir-crazy and needs to get out. "Maka, I'm gonna go hunting today," he tells her. "Do you think you'll be okay?"

She makes a face. "Just because I freaked out once, doesn't mean it's going to happen again. Chill. Go hunt. Kill animals, I don't care. I'll find something to do to occupy myself, I promise."

He's gone for the better part of what she assumed is around ten hours, but who's counting? She's fine for the first few, any who. Hunting takes a long time, she gets it. What she _doesn't_ understand is how he leaves with so few weapons- a concern that especially pops to mind when she finds that he's left his hunting gun behind, propped up against a broken glass window right at the entrance of the mall.

The more she thinks about it, the more it bugs her.

The next few hours, she spends flip-flopping between trusting him and not trusting.

There was something he was keeping from her, that much was for certain. But why, that was the question. Did he mean to cause her harm?

Humans didn't necessarily all become good once zombies entered the picture. In the first year after the virus hit, there were factions splitting all over town. People killing people, zombies killing people, people killing zombies.

It went on.

Even after most of the weak ones had been weeded out and only the survivalists and the lucky remained, there were still bad eggs. People so consumed by rage or sadness at having lost everything that they took things from others, too.

Soul didn't seem like that type. He didn't seem like any archetype, honestly. She was a classic survive-by-shutting-in trope, she knew that. Lonely and desperate but sensible, at least.

He wasn't going to live that kind of life, she could tell that much. He liked going out, moving from place to place, searching for other survivors; getting his small bursts of happiness from wherever they might come from.

She's aware that if she wanted to stay with him, she'd have to embrace that.

* * *

She hears the rumble of the Jeep engine come back into focus – it's surprising how much you can hear individual details when a town's hustle and bustle was completely still.

Some small part of her that had been tense for the past few hours relaxes; the part of her that didn't know what she'd done if he didn't come back, if she had to be alone again.

She packs up a meagre amount of possessions – a few clothes, the remaining scraps of non-perishable items in stock cupboards, those things. She knows how scarce they are, she knows that they have to move on soon.

He brings back some stuff for her arm. Some antiseptic, some bandages, some painkillers. Valium, most importantly.

She's not sure whether she should feel offended or not, so she sends a look his way.

He shrugs. "I'm not suggesting that you start taking it. It's just… it's something that's good to have if we're in an emergency."

She sends him a wry half-smile. "Thanks," she hesitates. "But I thought you were gonna leave me the first chance you got?"

Soul's eyes glaze over and he shrugs. "I want to make sure that you're okay first."

Her eyes turn to disappointment and she looks away. "Soul… I'm _not_ okay. I was catatonic. I had a panic attack at the worst possible time to start having panic attacks. I was hallucinating, before you came along. I'd been cooped up in that house on my own for a year. A _year_."

She knew that she'd be forced to admit this at some point. She expects Soul to wave it off and shrug nonchalantly, like he always does.

"There… are other survivors. Maybe we can find some people, and then you won't be on your own."

"Do _you_ want to be on your own?" she asks, pressing the subject.

"I don't," he pauses. "I just…"

"Don't want me around? You don't like me? Just admit it, Soul." She scowls. "I mean, it's ironic. The last two people stuck on the earth and you can't even stand to be around me. You'd rather be on your own than happy!"

His eyes turn wide as she flings accusations his way. "Maka, you're safe not around me, I swear. And we're _not_ the only two people-"

"How can you _say_ that? You're immune to the virus, you're clearly good at hunting and fighting, you clearly know your way round Colorado. How can you say I'm not safe here!"

"Because I'm the one who slashed your arm open, okay!" he admits, frustrated.

Maka blinks and processes this. "O-okay."

"I didn't realise that you were in the middle of the chaos and I went in just slashing like crazy." he corrects himself. "I was upset. I saw you and… I've felt bad about hurting you because of my own problems ever since."

She frowns at him and then a laugh escapes from her lips. "You know that I figured that out, right? I don't _care_. You didn't mean to do it, and you've been helping ever since. How could I blame you for that?"

He backs away and shakes his head, refusing this. In her head, Maka realises that he's more screwed up than she thought- maybe not as much as her, but he's got his neuroses.

She steps up close to him and places her forearms gingerly on his shoulders. "I don't blame you. I'm grateful. And I want us to stick together." She says softly.

He doesn't back away, but he doesn't look her in the eye either. "Wherever I go, people die. You're better off staying put or finding somebody else to hang out with."

"I like _you_."

He gives her a strange face and then his mouth contorts into a laugh. "God, you're persistent. Has anyone ever told you that?" he chuckles. "It's lucky I'm a fraction less stubborn than you."

They regard each other for a second and Maka smiles, sticking out a hand.

"That's a deal?"

"I didn't sign a contract…"

"We'll stay together, then."

He nods to her injured arm. "I've a feeling that this benefits you more than me, nerd."

She shakes her head. "I'm surprisingly resourceful, usually. Hence why I survived for so long. I'm not dead weight, I promise. And if I am ever dead weight… I'll leave you. That's another promise."

They carry on that way for something like half a week, but Maka knows what's coming, eventually. And it does come – exactly in the way that she expects.

He gets back from one of his random hunting trips with an uncharacteristic sense of urgency and tells her to quickly grab her stuff because they were leaving, now.

She hadn't put up much of a fight – she knew the consequences of getting too comfortable in any one given place. When they sensed that human, uninfected blood was hanging around – well, you were screwed.

Time to move on.

At least she'd have Soul by her side for a couple more weeks, or however long he fancied honouring their little deal.

She slings the backpack she's already packed over her shoulder and follows him as they quickly bustle their asses out of the mall and into his jeep. Not even sparing a single glance back to say goodbye, she gets ready to sprint as she hears Soul slamming open the deadbolt on the door.

"Quick to the car; follow me. They're waiting already."

He doesn't mince his words and she doesn't mince her steps.

"Get in the driver's – I need to start it up!" he yells now, and she quickly changes her direction towards the driver's seat as Soul sprints towards the engine.

There's more of them than she thought there would be – surrounding the building and walking faster; faster towards them in droves as their mad sprint to the car attracts attention.

Her nervous hands slip on the handle of the door and she swears under her breath, yanking harder and slamming the damn thing shut behind her after leaping into the seat.

Credit to him, Soul doesn't hesitate to hot-wire the thing. Maka hears the engine spark into gear and Soul scoots across the front bumper and slides neatly into the passenger seat beside her. Before he even shuts the door, he yells. "NOW!"

She slams her foot down on the accelerator with some gusto and tries hard not to smash into another car or a tree or something as the thing accelerates at a far quicker rate than her crappy old beater even managed to do.

"Shit, shit, shit," she swears over and over – for some reason, it helps her concentration.

"You're doing fine, keep going,"

"I'm going to crash it!" she wails as her steering becomes a little erratic. She's not used to driving at this speed, not when she's having to weave in and out of obstacles.

He appears to reassess the situation as the hoard of infected zombies seem to be gaining on them somehow. "I'll steer, just keep your foot on the gas!" he leans over and she surrenders the steering wheel to him.

He's clearly a more experienced driver, or maybe he just wasn't panicking as much as she was, because he manages to successfully manoeuvre them at least out of the parking lot and onto the road, only clipping one wing mirror in the process.

"Don't take your foot off the gas until I say."

She eyes the flashing fuel light with a little nervous swallow. She wonders if it was the wrong time to point out; or if he already knew and was just putting it to one side and hoping for the best.

It appears to be the latter because he reads her mind.

"It only started flashing a second before I got here. Should have twenty minutes left of fuel at this speed. Keep going."

Her heart flutters a little less quickly as this information sinks in and she feels relief. Taking a quick look in the rear-view mirror, she sees the crowd of zombies managing to tail them is quickly deteriorating.

"We're losing them, Soul," she says tensely.

"Keep going."

"I will," she grimaces. "I can steer now," she mentions – they're on a flat road.

"Okay." He leans back and surrenders the steering back to her, running a hand through his white hair. "Jeez. I'm gonna go grey."

She doesn't point that he's already kind of grey, and instead keeps her eyes locked on the road without a word.

"That was way too hairy for me. We need to be more careful. We should've left that place a few days before we did."

Maka bites her lip.

"But they couldn't have got in?"

"They're smarter than you think. They could have waited us out, waited until we were starving and there were thousands of them." Soul shakes his head vehemently. "You were lucky that never happened to you, staying on your own before."

She swallows and thinks hard about this titbit of information. "Maybe that's what happened, though. The night that I… that night that you saved my life." She muses. "Maybe they were waiting for me."

Soul shrugs as if it couldn't possibly matter and folds his arms.

They drive in silence for another few minutes and then Soul sighs. "Okay. I think we've fully lost 'em now."

Maka nods and bites her lip, easing her foot off from the accelerator hesitantly. The truck slows down by a fraction of a margin and so does her racing heartbeat. "We're still going to need to-"

"I know, I know…" he groans. "Ugh… okay, we'll keep going until we find another vehicle. There should be something we can drive in coming up soon."

They seem to pass by ten minutes of relatively empty country roads and Maka can feel Soul start to worry beside her. Strangely, she feels a sense of calm.

It's almost like – he's so chill, that usually, she feels obliged to do all the worrying for the both of them. But now that he was, quite righteously, freaking out, it was like her chance to do some rational, logical, calm thinking.

Although perhaps in this situation, panicking was the rational option.

"_Godammit_, what the hell is wrong with this backwater-ass town," he growls after a few more minutes of car-less road. "Shit. Keep going."

Maka feels the truck start to slow and she moves her foot further down on the gas pedal. It doesn't help. Her eyes flicker up to the empty, dirt road and then to her companion, whose currently cradling his face in his hands.

"Soul," she says warningly.

"DAMMIT!" he barks suddenly, making her jump.

The truck pulls to a stop and Maka looks at him for a second.

"Um…"

"Grab your shit and quickly. We're walking this."

"B-but-"

"What other option do we have, Maka?"

She flinches at the frankly aggressive use of her name. "We could wait in the car for a bit…" she suggests meekly, knowing that he's not going to go for it.

"I'm not sitting around waiting to be dinner in a can," he snarls and swings his car door open with his backpack on his back. He doesn't forget to grab his hot-wiring gear from the engine before they head off onto the road on foot, she notes.

Ever hopeful, she thinks wryly.

She can't blame him for this situation. If anything, this is her fault. She's the one who wanted him to keep still and stay in one place – she knew what she was signing up to when she asked to travel around with him.

It was to be a life of close shaves and dirt roads.

They trudge side-by-side in silence for the most part, with Maka making the odd comment about something they pass to which Soul would make some placating noise and then they'd lapse back into silence again.

She feels oddly cheery despite dire straits, and comments as such.

He snorts. "I'm glad someone is. Might as well have a good last day on the earth, huh?" he asks, then makes a face. "Sorry. Guess misery loves company."

"S'ok."

He sighs and rubs his forehead a little, stressed. "How is your arm?" he asks, looking at her bandages.

"A lot better, actually. I think I can probably take the bandage off soon."

"Yeah, well. Leave it on as long as you can. The last thing you want is an infection."

"Lot of those going around."

Soul snorts at her flippant comment and makes the first genuinely amused smile she's seen in about a week. "You've got a point, there."

There are about three trudges of quiet before Maka starts a conversation and Soul groans inwardly. Well, perhaps a little of it was extraneous, too.

"So, uh. Tell me about what happened to you after the… the infection. Who were you with? What did you get up to? Where did you go?"

He scowls and kicks a rock along the road. "I don't want to talk about it."

"Well, make something up, then. I won't exactly know the truth and besides: I don't care. I'm bored, and we might die soon. Just humor me, for God's sake."

He grimaces and sighs. "Fine, fine," he makes a faraway face. "I was in… Nevada. I... was based there, for work. The desert."

Maka frowns. "An army base in the middle of the Nevada desert?"

"Somethin' like that," he mumbles. "Most of us were okay, for a little while. I had these friends, I hung out with them for a while."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah… one of 'em was this quiet Japanese girl. Tsu, and Star. Star was… probably my best friend, although he was one of those guys that _you_ would probably _hate_."

She frowns. "Why?"

Soul shrugs and smiles a little, but it's faded. "I guess he's just obnoxious. Loves himself too damn much. You… you're more down to earth, I think."

"Loves? Present? He's alive?" she wonders.

"I have no reason to think otherwise." Soul shrugs. "There was a bunch of us hanging together, for a short while after the first outbreak. From the academy."

"You were at military academy?"

"I was… I was sort of training a bunch of new recruits. It's… hard to explain." He bites his lip. "Look, you wanted the whole story. I'll try to tell it, but… it's going to sound a little hard to believe."

"Go ahead," she nods permissively, shooting him an encouraging smile.

"I… was fairly high up in the ranks, I guess you could say. So were these guys I was with, at the time."

"B-but you're only my age?"

"It… it didn't really work like that, in the branch I was in. It was more about skill than experience. There were more senior people than me, but… well, you don't need to know about that. Anyway, I found out, about the military's role. In… spreading this virus."

Maka blinks, taken aback. "What do you mean, their role?"

"I mean exactly what I said. The military – the government – whatever. The reason for the virus even existing is our department's fault. It was never supposed to get so out-of-control, but the virus got into the wrong hands, I guess." He scratches his head. "After everything went sideways, I was travelling with a bunch of those guys, from the academy. It was fine, for a bit. But then… people started dying. People started getting infected. It was a shitshow – well, you know how it went. You were there," he sighs. "I started asking questions, things that I really should have asked quite a while before. I found out… some shady stuff, that I didn't need to know. About how this crap all got started."

"Jesus, Soul." She breathes. "Is this really true?"

He shrugs. "You don't have to believe it. Like you said, we'll probably die soon." He props up a half-smile on his face. "Anyway, soon after that, I didn't really want to hang out with those guys anymore. It wasn't their fault, I guess. But… I was the only one who seemed to care. I wanted to go and kill the guy who formed the virus in his lab, in the first place."

Maka's eyes widen.

"And…?"

"I found him." Soul rubs his forehead. "I couldn't… I couldn't do it. After that, I couldn't be around anything that reminded of him, or the academy."

"So, you've been on your own since then?"

"Not exactly."

"Oh yeah?"

"A bunch of us split off together, kind of misfits. Another group from the academy. This was Star and Tsu, and a few others. I was… kind of in charge, I guess. I had a feeling that they all thought that I was kind of weird, which is probably true." He suddenly looks sombre and stares at the sky for a second, shielding his eyes from the sun. Maka realises that he's stopped in his tracks and she does so too, itching to find out more about his story.

"Ok?"

"Well, one day. One of the girls with us… Kim. She died. She got killed, by a group of assholes who were going around shooting and raiding other survivors." He says, tonelessly. "It was my fault."

"What happened?"

"I thought the coast was clear. I thought we were safe. I was wrong. She died."

Maka falls silent.

"They didn't so much kick me out as I left voluntarily. I couldn't be around anyone. I'm… not a leader. I'm not someone who people should trust to keep them alive. I failed Kim. I failed Ox, her boyfriend. I _failed_."

Maka swallows a thick ball of emotion that wells in her throat at hearing him talk so candidly. "It's okay, Soul," she offers, a little hoarsely. "You… you made a mistake."

He stares up at the sun for a few more seconds, and then stares at Maka. "You don't get it. This…this, is why you can't be around me for long. You're better off on your own, trust me. I can't protect anybody. If I had done something sooner… I could have saved _everybody_." He laments. "If I hadn't been so stupid and arrogant, and wrapped up in my own stupid nonsense, I could have saved Kim, and everybody _else_."

Maka puts a hand on his arm, which he yanks away.

"No, don't. You don't want to stay with me. If… if you get hurt, and it's my fault- I don't know what…" his throat is too thick with emotion and he has to clear it before continuing his train of thought. "I don't know what I'd do if that happened to me again."

"None of what happened is your fault, Soul. And even if it is… I still want to stay with you," she smiles encouragingly at him.

"Maka…" he starts, a low voice.

"No; _listen_. I don't _need_ protecting. I can survive on my own. I survived up to this point without any help, that much should be obvious to you. No, what _I_ need is someone to keep me sane, keep me from going crazy. I just want company. I don't need any sort of protection. If I die, I die. And that's on me, not you."

They share what Maka presumes to be a meaningful look (although with Soul one could never be too sure) and as a jolt of electricity runs through her spine, she realises that she's got one hell of a crush on the boy.

It comes as a little bit of a surprise. The boy wasn't exactly Prince Charming. He's surly. Uncommunicable. Stubborn. Mysterious. And Maka hadn't exactly trusted anything with a Y chromosome since before the apocalypse.

Why change that?

Well… he was handsome enough, for starters, she thinks wryly. Smart. Laissez-faire. Charmingly laconic. (Is that just 'uncommunicable' rebranded, she wonders?) He had saved her life a few times over now. And to top it off… he _was_ the only other person left alive.

Did that count for anything?

"What is it?" he asks, looking a little uncomfortable. She's ejected from her thoughts suddenly, realising that she's probably been staring at him for a little too long without speech.

"Have you ever had a girlfriend?" she asks out of nowhere; too clunky of a segue to be remotely suave, which is what's she's aiming for.

He frowns and shrugs. "At school and at the academy I had… a lot of… well, you wouldn't call them girlfriends. Girls."

"You _had_ a lot of girls?" she wrinkles up her nose.

He laughs. "Ah. Well, that came out bad. But to be honest, yeah."

There's a silence while they both process this.

"Anything serious?" Maka pushes further.

"I guess a few of them lasted a little longer than others. Nothing, really. After all this happened… I guess I ended up with Blair for a little while."

For some reason, that name really resonates with Maka, and she can't figure out why.

"Who was Blair? What was she like?"

Soul makes a face. "Annoying, for the most part. Not my type at all, it was more of a relationship of convenience. When I split off from the group neither of us took it too hard, I don't think."

"Not your type?" Maka wonders briefly if she would ever fit his 'type'. She doubts it.

He snorts. "You know. Gorgeous, but a little air headed. Not much going on up there, if you know what I mean," he trails off, and as she waits for more, he scratches his head. "Okay, okay. Let's see… she was a bit of a trickster, I guess. That was fun, sometimes. Sometimes it was really irritating. What else… she was a huge flirt, that much is true. She did it with anyone, sometimes without even meaning to, and she could have boys charmed in a matter of seconds. It was… a useful skill, on occasion."

Maka grins. "Gorgeous girl with a fun side? But she's not your type?"

He shrugs. "I like more serious girls."

Her heart flutters for a second but she cools it, tells herself she's being stupid.

"What about you?" he turns the tables back onto her, sick of talking about himself. "Any boyfriends? Or girlfriends, I don't discriminate." He raises his hands up placidly.

"Neither to report. A few of the guys I travelled with before took an interest in me but… again, not so much my type."

"And what is that?" he asks, more boldly than she had managed when it was her turn for that question.

"Ngh," she replies, muffling the noise with her lips. "I'm not sure, I guess. I just know they weren't it. Alistair was alright, I suppose. He was a little too… what's the word? Happy-go-lucky. His head was in la-la-land. I guess I want- or wanted- to be with someone who was more of a realist. Rational thinking. All that crap."

"Right." He replies. He has something else to say, she can tell from his facial expression but at that exact moment, his eyes go wide and he starts sprinting towards the horizon.

"Soul!" she exclaims and follow his eyeline. She spies it too; a motorbike parked up ahead; and she also breaks into a sprint, after him.

They both run wildly towards it, together, both slightly hysterical. It's a little overkill but, well. That motorbike may just have saved their lives.

Soul grins as they approach it. "Can you believe it? I thought we were goners. I kind of wish I hadn't told you all that stuff about my life, now…"

"You didn't even tell me that much!" she grumbles, nodding to the bicycle. "Just… check it's working before you get too happy," she replies, warningly.

"Sure, sure… _buzzkill_," He shoots her a look so that she knows he's only joking.

He tampers with the wiring and after a few tense minutes, she hears the thing rumble into action to both of their immense relief. "Yes!" he exclaims, running a hand through his hair. "Right, Maka. What do you say we get the hell off this road?" he jumps up and swings his leg round the thing, smoothly enough that she can believe that he's done it a lot of times before.

"Sounds grand." She hops on the back behind him, a little uncertain of her balance at first.

"Have you ever been on the back of one of these?" he asks her, and she bites her lip and answers 'no'. "Okay, don't worry. I used to drive them all the time. You gotta hold onto my waist and stay still, don't wiggle around too much. If we turn, lean the same way I lean. That's about it, okay?"

She nods, excited, and before she knows it, the dusty wind is whipping through their hair – carefree, like they hadn't just been talking about how doomed they were just twenty minutes ago.

"WOOOOO!" she yells out loud, adrenaline coursing through her blood.

He chuckles. "You alright?"

"Yeah!"

They veer through maybe fifteen more minutes of leafy suburban backroads, and eventually they pass what appears to be a sleepy residential of a city's abandoned suburbia.

"Fort… collins," Maka reads from a dusty old sign that still exists from when borders, and town names, really mattered. "It's an army base."

"We could see if they have any weapons."

"And get a better mode of transport…" she suggests.

He makes a petulant face. "No fair, I wanna stay riding this thing."

She rolls her eyes at his stubbornness but decides not to question him. As the two of them take in the scenery around them, he shudders. "I don't like being in a city."

Maka nods as her eyes trace the skyline. In Colorado, all the cities were interspersed by beautiful mountain views; peaks and valleys and trees and lush greenery. Of course, the ghostly emptiness of a city like this juxtaposed horribly with the leftover of what had been a bustling economy in its own right.

For her, it just accentuates the loss of life; of society.

She says as such, and Soul sends a strange glance her way. "Alright, Edgar Allen _Poe_."

"Well, what did you mean when you said that you don't like cities?" she asks, irritated. She can't believe that the gloomiest person she's ever has the nerve to call her that. She stops short of telling him matter-of-factly that the comparison isn't apt at all.

"I just mean that in a big city, there's lots of places for the infected to hide. Lots of… nooks and crannies. Coupled with a denser population of things that want to kill you." He comments, staring up at the large houses that seem to getting more and more saturated and they speed towards the centre.

Maka shudders and clutches Soul's jacket a little tighter.

"We'll be in and out, promise."


	13. Chapter 13

He finds a truck with a full tank of gas and a key in the ignition and considers himself extremely lucky. He does have to haul a skeleton out of the driver's seat, but that's just a typical Tuesday for you.

Maka wrinkles her nose up as they board the larger vehicle. "Smells."

"There was a dead guy decomposing in here," he points out, and then hesitates. "Maye I'll grab some Axe or something to cover it when I get the chance."

Not even _he's_ sure if he's being flippant or sincere at this point.

She shudders at the thought.

The rotting stench of putrefaction would beat the chemical assault that was Axe body spray, any day. "Why did teenage boys use so much of that crap anyway?" she wonders aloud. "It smells awful, and it clings to every available surface."

Soul shrugs. "Speaking as someone who was _fairly_ recently a teenage boy, I think we just thought it would get us laid."

She blinks rapidly, unused to hearing her companion talk so frankly about his sex life. "Can't believe it worked… I think it was some pretty misleading marketing, actually."

He shrugs in agreement. "_I_ certainly never had sex as a direct or indirect result of Axe body spray."

She sniffs. "You can't possibly know if there was indirect correlation. In fact, it's possible that Axe body spray was indirectly responsible for every sexual encounter you had between the ages of fifteen and nineteen," she grins, taking the thought and running with it _ad absurdum._

He lets out a low chuckle. "If that's the case, then I _really_ could've done without the stuff."

* * *

They spend the next three or so hours scoping out every single supermarket, shopping centre and corner store they can possibly find. They come up pretty much empty handed, except Maka manages to find a can of expired chestnuts hanging around in some pantry, on the floor. They munch on chestnuts together, strategizing and working out a game plan for the next day or so.

"So," Maka says, chewing. "Obviously we can't stick around in Fort Collins," she points out. "It's dead here and come the night we'll be dinner. Or we'll be one of them." She shudders at the mere thought. "I figured we could ride to Denver, though. See what's going on? Maybe on the way we could pick up some food, make a few stops."

"And then what?" Soul asks. "What happens when we get to Denver?"

"I don't know, we stay there for a while. Survive. Maybe we'll find some more people..."

"We won't. There's nobody... in Colorado. What do you think I did before I bumped into you? I used to just drive from city to city, state to state, searching for anyone. Survivors, a community... there's nothing here."

Maka's mouth downturns and she frowns. "We could try again..."

"There isn't, Maka," he reiterates. "It's a total ghost town."

"Well, then, what would _you _suggest?" She leans back, raising an accusative eyebrow.

He stares up at her, his eyes burning intensely crimson and making her want to look away. "We're going to Nevada. I know there are groups of people still alive there. Well, there was the last time I was there, anyway..."

"Nevada?"

"Nevada. In the desert."

"Your military base!"

"...kinda," he shuffles awkwardly. "Academy."

She scoffs and jabs a finger at him. "You're going to have to stop being so evasive _eventually_. I mean, we're literally _going _there. You might as well just tell me what it is that you're hiding from me."

He makes a frustrated noise from his throat and then lets his face fall into one of his hands. "Why do you pry so much?"

She decides not to get annoyed by this, but only because he seems to be genuinely angsty about whatever he's hiding, so instead she beams. "It's my inquisitive nature."

"You're incorrigible," he drawls, not irritated enough to cause a bigger fuss.

"Didn't expect a brute like you to know a big word like that," she grins.

He shrugs. "Yeah, well. I grew up rich. Turns out, you can polish a turd, and teach it to play piano and talk all good when you're done with the polishing," he grins back, flashing his spiked teeth once again.

Maka tries not to stare at them when they make their rare appearances.

"So... who are we going to meet in Nevada?"

Soul grimaces. "Whoever's left alive, I guess. Lucky them."

He reaches for a chestnut from the can that's sitting between them, and comes up empty handed. "_Damn_, out of chestnuts."

"I could do with some meat, if I'm honest."

"You hungry? If you stay here, I'll get some food." He leaps up from his crouching post and shoves his hands in his pockets.

"W-wait, can't I come with you? Isn't it safer to travel and hunt together?" her eyebrows knit together. "Or... I could go hunting, today...?"

He bares his teeth in clear objection to both these ideas.

"Are you sure that you're okay to do that?"

"How do you think I used to _eat_ before I met you? Jesus, Soul, I had you pegged as many things, but a sexist wasn't one of them..."

He rubs the bridge of his nose with his forefinger and his thumb. "I meant your injury."

"Oh," she blinks, surprised. In truth, she had forgotten that she had injured herself at all. "It's healing pretty slowly but pretty solidly. If I had a doctor, he'd probably prescribe me some painkillers, a healthy diet and some time off work."

He grimaces. "I've got vodka?"

She rolls her eyes but doesn't try to stop the smile from forming over her features. "Heh, thanks."

* * *

They drive only a little way out, only so they aren't at risk of being hunted themselves. He leads her to a small square where they crouch behind a bush.

She looks over at him and around them. "Good spot."

"It's alright," he replies, a little distracted. "I'll look out, make sure we're safe."

She raises an eyebrow over and him but shrugs. He seems… tense, for some reason. Tenser than his usual laconic self, at any rate.

"Fine." She scoffs, lifting the hunting gun up so she can peer through the tracker. "Just… stand there."

They wait silently for the longest time. Maka's on the verge of putting down the gun which is making her arm ache, when suddenly she spots it out the corner of her eye. A deer, just on the periphery of the square.

She locks eyes with Soul who nods silently, barely moving a hair's width.

She stares through the gun lens at the thing. It can hear something, it knows someone's there – but it's not convinced yet that it should bolt. She nestles down a little, tries to get a better position and then:

The shot echoes through the square and the sound of the deer falling onto it's side follows shortly after.

Soul runs off towards it before Maka has a chance to celebrate her victory.

"I know you're hungry, but-!" she whispers to herself, shaking her head.

Somehow, Soul manages to hear her, because he beckons her towards him. She sighs and flips the safety back onto the gun, following him towards the deer she's just shot at.

The thing is very, very dead.

"Wait, was that a clean shot?"

"Nope," Soul points to the thing's throat, which has now been cut open. "We need to get this back quietly. I just… I have a bad feeling about here. I can smell them close-by."

Maka nods and the two of them get to work with the dead deer, trying their best to bustle it into the backseat of Soul's truck. What she hadn't realised, in her many years of hunting for food, was that deer are _heavy_.

Both are sweaty and covered in deer blood by the time they actually manage to successfully shut the door.

"I feel like that probably could have gone better," Maka surmises.

"Get in the car," Soul replies, gruff as ever.


	14. Chapter 14

They spend the night in a 7/11. It's pretty much devoid of anything to eat, but Soul gathers together some firewood and some kindling and gets to work trying to create a fire. At first, he tries to use his lighter but quickly realises that it's out of gas.

"Dammit!" he swears

"C'mon, let's rub sticks. There's nothing else to do, is there?"

He grimaces and they squat side by side, rubbing together sticks.

The only sounds either of them hears is the chirping of crickets outside, their own breathing, and the sound of wood grinding against wood as they work hard.

"I feel like a goddamned caveman," he says after a while.

"It's nice to get back to nature," she says serenely, warranting her a strange look from Soul. He stares for about two full seconds, pausing his hand movements, and then they both simultaneously burst into laughter.

"Yeah, this feels like some kind of goddamn relaxation retreat."

"People would probably have paid good money for this kind of immersive experience back in the day."

"Minus all the killing machines."

"Eh, there's a few bugs to wrinkle out," she shrugs. There's a silence, but it's a peaceful one. Then: Maka decides to broach the subject again. "I'm sorry that I'm the only other person left alive and I'm losing my mind."

He frowns, still whittling away. "You do realise that there are others out there, right? There are whole communities. You keep saying that we're the only two left but it's not true. I've seen and met dozens of people; dozens of groups."

Maka blinks.

For some reason, this hadn't really occurred to her.

"Well… why aren't you with them?"

"I don't know. All of 'em seemed so caught up in their own microcosmic power politics. I never fit in. I wanted to travel alone, seeing what I could find." He sighs. "If you want, I'll take you to where I know there's a bunch of survivors, living together…"

Maka nods frantically. "Yes. Yeah. I… I'd like that."

Soul smiles a faded smile. "My company that bad, huh?"

"No!" she exclaims. "It's not that! I just… I was so isolated before, you know? I think that's why I started hallucinating."

"The cat…" Soul remembers.

"Yeah. Other stuff, too. Before you. And that weird night in the mall, when I was all freaked out over nothing. I just… I've read stuff, before, on how humans- we need social contact. It's in our DNA. Or we just start to go all kinds of crazy. It doesn't even take long, before you start to lose your mind."

"I just figured you were a lone wolf, too. Like me. I figured that's why you'd holed yourself up in that house for so long, without any company," he reasons, staring at the wood in front of him.

"Yeah, well. You can't live the rest of your life like that."

He shrugs. "There's… a group in Nevada. They're good people – a little weird, but good. They'll take good care of you, and if I vouch, they'll let you hang around."

"Please," she begs. "I just need some normalcy. Some friends."

Soul sighs. "I don't think you'll find it with that lot, but whatever."

They go back to their determined fire-making. After a couple more minutes, Maka's sticks begin to produce black smoke – dwindling heat at first, but then it becomes stronger until it bursts into a tiny flame between the sticks.

"Good job," Soul smirks, throwing his own sticks to the ground. "Keep going. I'll get a bit of kindling and we'll light that. Don't let it go out!" he gingerly lights a piece of crumpled up paper and then throws it on the fire. Quickly, the rest of the kindling catches alight as they both stare hard at the fire, hoping that the logs will burn.

Soul pokes it with a longer wooden stick, seemingly trying to arrange it so that the fire takes and Maka realises with a jolt that she's hurt his feelings.

"You know that I enjoy travelling with you, right?"

He snorts. "You don't need to feel sorry for me. I'm a big boy."

"No! I don't! It's that, I don't know, you seemed a little put out when I mentioned wanting to join a group a second ago."

"It's fine."

"No… I just. I mean, I'm a headcase at the moment. I'm all over the place. You don't need me dragging you down, I'm a mess."

"Everyone we know is dead, Maka. They have been for years. Those who aren't dead are flesh eating - I hate the word zombies – but _zombies_, and nothing will ever be the same as it was ever again." He pauses for effect. "Who is their right mind would be mentally healthy in that scenario?"

"Well, you seem to be alright."

He shakes his head gives her a sad smile. Then, he lifts up his right hand and points to his knuckle with his left.

She bites her lip.

How hadn't she noticed this before? His knuckle is covered in scabs and scars; bruises and a little dried blood. It's also wonky.

"Is that… is that okay?"

"Not hugely. It healed funny the last time I broke it."

"W-what happened?"

"I got angry is what happened. I got angry about everything, this whole messed-up stupid scenario, this whole messed-up version of the world. Punched a wall. Punched several walls, _several_ times," he drawls. "Over the space of several months."

She draws in a breath and then takes his injured hand in hers to inspect it further.

"Does it hurt?"

"Yeah," he doesn't even try to lie.

She brushes her thumbs over it a few times, causing him to wince. "Sorry. When did this happen?"

"Just before I met you," he admits. "Guess we were both going out of our heads."

She lets his hand go, and as soon as she does, it reaches into his pocket to pull out a packet of cigarettes.

She sighs serenely as they both watch the fire catch – smoke beginning to billow out in waves of black tar, licking the off-white plasticky ceiling of the 7/11. "Redecorating," Soul comments, staring up at the mess, leaning forward to light his cigarette on the concurrent flames.

Her head falls to rest on his shoulder and his non-smoking arm snakes around her shoulders, pulling her gently into him.

The fire rages in front of them.


	15. Chapter 15

Maka keeps watch that night as Soul gets some rest, so she naps in the back of the van the next day as he drives them out of Fort Collins.

He drives for hours and hours, maybe five or six. He's only stops to change fuel once, at a random gas station in some nowhere town. It's not worth waking Maka up for, so he gets the fuel done as silently as he can, trying not to disturb her sleep.

It's only a few hours later, when he's on the long stretch road to Salt Lake City, Utah, that he slows the truck to a halt and stares out the window.

The view stretches out for miles and miles before them; sloped piles of jagged white in the distance ascending like towers between grasslands and pine trees.

He takes a second, blinks up at the vista before him.

"Maka," he calls. "Wake up."

She wakes up with a somewhat disgruntled jolt; a moment of panic. "What is it?" she hisses. "Jesus, Soul, you scared the bejesus outta…" she trails off, her moment of anger forgotten as her eyes adjust to the bright sun reflecting off the snowy mountains. "Wow. That is beautiful."

"I know. I woke you up so you could have a look at it."

They stare in awe for a few seconds. "Do you think we could get out for a second?" she asks, and Soul agrees. He grabs the gun from the passenger seat before they exit the car, not that he thinks that they'll encounter any real problems in the middle of nowhere like this.

She gets out first and Soul follows her to the edge of the road tracks where they peer out through squinted eyes.

"Damn," she breathes. "Thanks, Soul."

He doesn't reply but he feels her reach for his hand, so he takes it in his.

"You know, I'm glad we met. And not just… not just because I was lonely. I really… I think I would have liked you, before all this," she waves towards the road; the abandoned SUV.

Soul just shrugs a little awkwardly. "Thanks, Maka."

A few weeks ago, she would have found it rude that he didn't echo her sentiment. Offensive, even. Now… she understands him a little better. She's used to his gruff ways, the total lack of even trying to conform to social normalcy. "Come on. We'd better get on the road."

"I don't want to leave here."

He chuckles. "Well, I could do with a break from driving. We could go on a walk?"

She nods. "I would like that."

They end up walking for over an hour; passing several gorgeous-looking lakes, the endless blue of the sky and the endless bushy green of the forest.

"It doesn't wear off, does it?"

Soul smiles. "I know what you mean."

"I always wanted to take off one day, just go and hike the Appalachian trail. I spent a while living in Maine, so it's not like I couldn't've just jumped on the trail, to Georgia."

"Why didn't you? You said your dad was a survivalist."

"Yeah, he was. He was… he was always away, for work. He always promised that we'd hike it together. I was always so busy studying for my law exams and he was always so busy with work that we never got around to doing it. And now…"

"Yeah," Soul says, negating the need to finish her sentence.

"Maybe you and I could hike it," she suggests, a little shyly.

"We're a few states away from Appalachia," he comments drily. "But I wouldn't rule it out. One of the few things that benefitted from all this is the natural environment." He cocks his head. "And incidentally, one of the few places we'd be more at risk of a bear attack than a zombie one."

"No kidding." Maka grins. "It's like the consumerist zombies all got turned into actual zombies and forgot all about consumerism. Now they want to eat brains."

"Wow, how poetic," Soul rolls his eyes. "Were you into politics, before all this?"

"Oh, my mom was. She was a gung-ho crazy liberal, after she quit the service." Maka smiles, remembering. "All our food growing up was all vegan, all home-grown from her allotment, all wholegrain, the whole lot. The best days were when my dad would take us to a restaurant out of town."

"Us?"

Maka smiles. "I was an only child. I meant 'us' as in, me and my dad."

"Oh, right." Soul nods.

"Were your family at all political?" Maka asks, politeness more than curiosity.

His eyes flicker away. "The same kind of conservative that all wealthy families are."

"Sounds… fun," Maka grimaces. "Did you get along with them?" she asks, remembering a vague garbled sentence once about how his mother hadn't approved of his music, or something similar.

Soul smiles. "Not exactly. I left at 14."

Maka's eyes bulge and her mouth falls open. "What?! Fourteen?!"

"I skipped town and went to school in… in Nevada."

"And you grew up there?"

"I grew up there."

"Was it a boarding school?" she wonders. "How did you afford…?"

"Let's just say it was… more like an academy. For people with… special skills."

Maka's eyes narrow and she stops walking; dead in her tracks. "No."

"What's up?" he frowns, stopping after a few paces, realising that she's no longer next to him. "Why did you stop?"

"Because! You need to tell me what's going on with you, right now. You need to tell me what the hell is up with your past. You just skipped town and went to some random academy at fourteen? Then you were a senior member of the military? What the hell, Soul?"

He swallows and nervously scratches the back of his neck. "Look, it's kind of complicated…"

She scowls and shakes her head. "I need to know."

"Can't we just-"

"No!" she exclaims. "You're lying to me, or something's up. Every time your past gets brought up; you get weird. I've told you everything about myself, _everything_. Now I'm trusting you with my life, and you won't even be honest with me about this?" her voice sounds hoarse but she's not going to budge on this one, not even an inch.

Soul sighs and his head falls in his hands. "Maka… I… I'm…" he starts, but his head seems to cloud with doubts and he's self-censoring as he's trying to speak. "I had a _really_ weird childhood."

"You don't say!"

"And I'd… rather not talk about aspects of it," he swallows. "But… I will tell you one thing."

"And what's that?" she raises an eyebrow, scepticism mingling with curiosity.

He holds up his hand, the one that just earlier, Maka was noticing the bruises covering. Then, before her eyes, his fingers shift from knobbled, human flesh to something else entirely.

She gasps.


	16. Chapter 16

His whole index finger is transformed into a flat, sharp blade – curved towards the ground.

She reaches out to touch it, almost in a ghost-like trance, and when her fingers first contact the cold, hard metallic substance, she gasps. An electric shock crackles through her entire body, her _soul_, and her hand whips back as if she's been stung.

She stares searchingly up at his face

"W-what the _hell_?" she chokes out.

His fingers transform back into human fingers and she swears, loudly, running a shaking hand through her hair. "_Fuck_, Soul. What is this?"

"Ever heard of Shibusen?"

"Yes, of course I've _heard_ of Shibusen. I thought it was a myth! _Everyone_ thought it was a myth! Are you seriously telling me that the stories of are really true? There's actually…" she swallows, pausing in between her sentence. "You mean there's actually people out there who can…"

"Who can turn into weapons, yeah." He sighs. "I didn't want to tell you. I thought you'd react this way-"

"You're a _demon_! You're an actual _demon_, shit, Soul, I trusted… I trusted you," she chokes out, terrified. She backs away as Soul pinches the bridge of his nose, frustrated. "Stay away from me!"

"Maka, I'm not going to hurt you," he says quietly, his voice a little hoarse.

"Why should I believe that? I'm not an idiot. You…" realisation dawns on her. "That's why you never use a gun when you hunt. That's why you joined the 'military' at fourteen. That's why… that's how you cut open my arm."

"I didn't mean to do that, Maka, I was trying to _save_ you," he pleads. "Please, listen to me."

"She backs away further. "I need to get out of here. I need to go. I can't be with you."

"Fine, fine." He says, giving in. "Just… let me drive you somewhere where you'll be safe, please." He eyes her for a second, desperate. "Just… for me."

"She scowls and shakes her head. "No. No. I have to go…" she sets off to leave but after a second, realises where they are. They're in the middle of nowhere; nothingness spread out around them for miles at a time.

"Maka. Please listen to me-"

"You _lied_ to me. You're evil." She spits.

He's got to admit, he has a pretty high threshold for pain, these days. Even so, that had _hurt_.

She's not sure why she's so angry suddenly, but she is. She's angry, and panicking, and her mind is clouding with thoughts as her vision begins to warp.

His fists are tightened balls of stress but his voice is outwardly calm. "I never lied."

"You lied by omission. I never would have travelled for so long with someone so dangerous," she blurts. "You could have killed me."

"I would never have intentionally hurt you."

"Maka stumbles and steadies herself on a nearby tree, her breathing erratic. Soul doesn't step forward but tries to calm her. "You're okay, Maka. You're just panicking. It's gonna be okay."

"Okay. Okay." She breathes.

"Just focus on your breathing, yeah?" Soul asks, his eyebrows still tightly woven together.

Yeah," she replies, breathlessly. "Got it. Gimme… gimme a second."

It takes a few minutes before the world stops clouding over and the panic centre in her brain decides to once again give way to her prefrontal cortex, and she stands up straight, straightening her dirty jacket as she does so. She's embarrassed. Especially seeing as Soul just witnessed that entire breakdown and is still, for some reason, waiting for her to calm down.

"You're a little better now?"

"Yeah," she replies, awkwardly. "Sorry. I, uh… I don't know. My brain…"

"It's actually a pretty normal reaction to seeing something like that for the first time, believe it or not." He chuckles. "Imagine my reaction when I first found out, age fourteen." He muses. Then, his tone turns serious again. "I understand if you don't trust me anymore. But Maka, if you think that I'm going to abandon you in the middle of nowhere, you've got another thing coming. You're getting in my truck and I'll drive you somewhere safe. Then, we can decide what to do."

She swallows.

And then, they walk back to the truck together.

* * *

She stares out of the window the entire way to Salt Lake, not saying a word.

He doesn't really try for conversation either. His driving speeds up in tandem with the heaviness of tension buzzing almost audibly between them. The roar the of the engine is the thing that Maka focuses on to keep herself from hurling herself out of the window.

She feels alone, again.

No, that's not it – she doesn't feel alone. She should feel alone, because she's currently sitting in a car with someone who could snap at any moment and slice her from head to toe, and she'd be completely defenceless – but she doesn't.

She wants to hate him, she wants to fear him, but it's not quite that.

She's _terrified_ of the feeling of electricity she felt when she touched him.

_What had that feeling been?_

She's never felt anything like it.

Maybe it was a weapon thing? She doesn't know how it worked, it was entirely possible.

It was also entirely plausible that Maka's hallucinating mind had made the whole thing up. There was, she realised, a distinct possibility that she was sitting in her bathtub back in Colorado, foaming at the mouth, having completely lost her marbles.

She studied solipsism, she studied existentialism. She knows that there's no merit behind those one-way tickets to paranoia-avenue.

Besides, it's not like she'd never heard of people becoming weapons, before. It was the sort of thing that was treated the same as religion, or ghosts. Some people believed in it, some people thought it was a load of nonsense. Personally, Maka had been on the side of nonsense; with all three.

A strong part of her is itching to know more about it, but an even stronger part holds back.

A third, more tender part of her knows that she's hurt his feelings, and that she should apologise.

She holds back that one, too.


	17. Chapter 17

They silently park their truck outside a sprawling multiplex with signage indicating that they're near the 'City Creek Centre' and Soul gets to work loading his guns.

While he's busying himself, Maka puts her hands on her hips and takes a good look around; draws in a heavy breath.

"Here," Soul hands her two handguns and pulls the knife from out the back of his pocket. "Take these."

She blinks at him for a split second, confused. Then it dawns on her.

He's giving her his guns so he can leave her here.

"Are you going now?" she asks.

He regards her warily. "I was going to scope the place out. See if I can raid for any supplies, maybe even find somewhere to stay a couple of nights. I don't trust big cities."

He mentioned that before, she remembers. "Well… we should stick together, at least while we're here, right?" she theorises.

He sighs and leans back onto the bumper of the truck, staring off into the still-blue sky, now flecked with fluffy white clouds.

He doesn't say anything for a while, just stands there, squinting at the sun, hard.

"Soul?"

He sighs again. He was good at that. "Maka."

"What are you doing?"

"I don't know," he answers truthfully. "I really have no idea. I was getting us to Nevada, so we could meet up with my friends. Now… I don't know. You wanted me to leave you alone. I… I have no idea what to do."

She softens and leans on the truck next to him.

"Soul, I'm sorry I freaked out on you. It was… it was a lot to unpack, I guess. And…" she briefly considers telling him about the weird jolt-y feeling she had felt, but she decides that it would sound too weird. "I _am_ sorry."

There's a long silence, now.

There was a lot of those.

His fists are still curled into balls, she notices, and one of them is shaking just the tiniest amount. "I hate it. I didn't want to be this way."

It takes her a second to figure out what he's talking about. "You mean, you didn't want to be a weapon?"

"Hell no," he snaps. "It's in my genetics. My grandfather was a scythe, too, or so I'm told. And then, when everything got really messed up with my mom and dad, I used it to get out. Started at the academy. Got really good at it," he stares at his hands. He's started talking all of a sudden, and now it seems that he can't stop. "Then all this happened. That virus got out, messed everyone up real bad." He barks a laugh. "You know, all of this, the virus. It just a stupid experiment… they were just trying to understand why kishin act the way they do, killing everyone, eating people..." he mumbles a name, something she doesn't quite understand. "he... recreated this virus, just as a test. As a 'just in case' kind of measure." he chokes out an angry laugh. "Sick joke."

Maka's eyes are wider than saucers as she drinks this information in.

"Of _course_ it fell into the wrong hands." he continues, head in his own hands. It's been years since he's had to talk about this.

"Oh, God." she feels herself going faint. "Jesus."

"_Death_, actually. Not God." he corrects her.

She swears. "_Shit_!" There's a pause. "Did you know about it?" she asks tentatively.

"I already told you! No!"

"Can the professor, can he… can he reverse it?"

"No."

"Shit!" Maka swears. "Did you... ever ask?"

"What, do I look stupid? Obviously, I asked. There's _nothing_ he can do. This is permanent. This is the world, now. Nothing is ever going to back to how it used to be, ever." He kicks the truck with the full force of his foot and then yelps as the pain immediately spring back up his arches.

"Jesus, Soul. Are you okay?"

"Fine," he mutters.

She puts a hand on his arm. "I _am_ really sorry I said that stuff earlier. I am. I just… I just want to forget it, okay?"

His jaw clenches as her fists do the same.

"Come on, let's just find somewhere to sleep tonight."

They luck out in Salt Lake. Apparently, everyone here got turned to zombies pretty quick, because there's tonnes of supplies everywhere. It was almost the polar opposite to Fort Collins.

They stock up the truck with stacks and stacks of beans, canned potatoes, canned vegetables and soup – before cooking up a big pot of beans and rice over a bonfire in a Best-Buy.

"This is more like a worst-buy," Maka cracks, staring up at the ceiling, now green with moss as plants shoot up from the cracks in the tiled floor.

"Wow," Soul replies, almost completely deadpan.

"You know what would be really cool?"

"Shoot." Soul warms his hands on the fire.

"If we could sleep somewhere in a house, tonight," she asks. "Or… I guess, for a few nights." She sighs. "It's all malls and big open spaces with you. I kind of miss being in a home."

He frowns and shrugs. "Sure. If we find somewhere secure enough, I don't see a problem with that."

She's pleased that he hasn't just VETO'ed the idea outright, but there was still something missing from him, tonight. Some spark that just wasn't there; like he was occupied slightly with thoughts of something else, another place. She doesn't ask – doesn't feel like it's polite to, not after their little argument earlier.

They drive a little further out, find a big open house on a long street of very nice-looking houses, and Maka points to one. "This one."

"Yeah?" he raises an eyebrow, backing up the vehicle a little so that they can park just near the front door.

"Yeah. We can shimmy in and out up the drainpipe, no trouble."

"You're either gonna have to lockpick this window, or we'll have to smash it."

"We could smash it," Maka stares up, shielding the sun from her eyes with a single hand over her brow. "Doesn't look too thick."

He shakes his head. "We're not smashing through that without seriously calling some attention to ourselves."

"Oh, come on. This is practically a ghost town."

"No." he says, firmly.

She shrugs and places her hands around the drainpipe, testing it out to see if it holds her weight. "Maka…" Soul says. "Put this in your pocket." He hands her the gun. "Just in case there's… there's somebody inside, okay?"

"It's not likely. Everybody got evacuated, remember?" She reminds him, before hauling herself up by her arms. She clambers ungracefully up the drainpipe in a similar fashion, trying her best to muffle her grunts and groans of exertion. She climbs onto the sun-roof on the first floor, first – tries the window. It doesn't budge, and the glass looks particularly thick, too.

She shakes her head down at Soul.

Then, she climbs up to the second floor – tries one of those. It opens a crack, but not enough to climb in. It's a bathroom window, she realises.

She has to edge along the windowsill to get to the drainpipe which leads to the attic roof. It doesn't look secure enough to hold her weight, so she just clambers up the roof tiling, hoping to God that it doesn't crack. Luckily, it doesn't, and she manages to open the tiny porthole window embedded in the roof.

She nods down at Soul and opens it up, clambering through the thing.

He waits in silence for a few minutes. It's a little too long, actually. He starts to get nervous, begins to contemplate breaking in through the bay window in the front but holds himself back.

"Don't be an idiot, Soul," he mutters to himself. "She's okay."

His fears are relieved when he hears somebody on the other end fiddling with the locks and – finally, his heart can go back to beating at it's usual rate when Maka appears on the other side of the heavy wooden door, sweaty and triumphant.

"Get in, it's seriously awesome inside here!"

He does so, a little sceptical. "We need to board up all the first-floor windows and doors, quickly. Before it gets dark, okay?"

"But look at this place! It's amazing!"

He pauses for a second to look around. It is pretty bourgeois, but it's nothing compared to the place he grew up in. He doesn't say this, though. Instead, he simply nods and agrees with her. The large grand piano in the lounge room bores a hole through his skull, but he ignores it.

"Maka. Take the gun and do a quick sweep of the place, make double-sure that there's nothing skulking about, okay? I'm going to go and find some wooden board for the windows."

They get to work. Soul finds some wood in the garden shed and breaks it into chunks. Maka doesn't ask how; but she already knows. He locates a hammer and set of nails and they both begin nailing the boards to all the windows until not even a crack of sunlight could peek through.

"It's getting dark out," Maka points out.

"Relax. I'll keep watch tonight, okay?" he reassures her. "Trust me. I… I think we're safe here, for a few nights. If I remember right, most of Utah got evacuated pretty quickly."

Maka nods.

"Keep going on that one, you're doing a good job. I want to mount the rifle on the top floor in case we do have some trouble, okay?"

"Sure."

He was full of ideas, sometimes.

"I'm going to barricade the door, too. It's double locked, but… I want to be safe."

"So how do we get out? If we're surrounded?" Soul asks.

"The truck's right outside the top window, right? I say, if we need to leave in a hurry we jump down the side of the house and get in the truck quick-smart. The front door is just asking for trouble," she theorises.

"Sounds good to me," he shrugs.

It takes them about another hour to get everything sorted. It was pretty amazing, really, how fast they could work when they'd had enough food to eat and enough water.

When they're one-hundred-percent sure that they're safe and secure, they both relax a little more.

Not fully, not ever. You could never relax totally in this new world, but enough.

"Is it everything you ever dreamed of?" he asks, pulling out a chair and fiddling around with a screwdriver on the fire alarm.

She raises an eyebrow up at him. "It's pretty cushty here, you've got to admit." She smiles. "What the hell are you doing with that?"

He doesn't reply, but it becomes pretty much clear a second later, when he's pulling out the batteries and lighting up his cigarette.

"Right, right." She laughs. "Because everyone who can cure cancer is dead, and you want to join them?"

He shakes his head. "Because everyone I know is dead, and honestly _fuck_ caring about my health."

He roots around in the cabinet, looking for something. He doesn't find anything particularly edible, just a whole lot of rotten food.

"Come on, let's explore the place." She suggests, partly to distract him from the disappointment of not finding any food. They wander about the place in a bit of a daze, Soul still intermittently puffing on his cigarette. There's one big master bedroom, still with fancy linens from whoever used to live here. The shower-room is huge, with fancy beige tiles. It causes Maka to sigh up at it. "I wish I could have a shower."

He doesn't reply.

Next, they wander into what appears to be a child's room, but it's so bare and tidy that you'd hardly believe a child ever occupied this space. It's more like what a furniture catalogue might advertise as a child's room – all the toys are packed neatly away in organised boxes, the walls are all painted with these pristine hand-painted dinosaurs.

"Here's your room," she jokes.

He doesn't laugh.

The spend a bit of time poking around the attic, but there's nothing particularly exciting in there. Boxes and boxes of old memories, old clothes, an old life. It's creepy, and it's depressing. They come back down after not too long.

Downstairs is a little more interesting. In the lounge room, there's a grand piano in one corner, a huge plasma screen TV in the other corner and all sorts of fancy cream couches laid out here and there. There's even a chaise lounge at one end, with a fluffy pillow and heavy knitted throw artfully arranged on top.

"This family must have been rich."

"Or boring," comes Soul's reply.

"Probably both, I imagine." She eyes the piano out the corner of her eye. "Did you used to play? I swear you told me that, at one point."

He nods, his mouth down-turning. He's a little displeased that she remembered; he was hoping that it had gone forgotten about. "I used to."

"Want to play me a tune?"

He shakes his head. "Not now. It's dark. I don't want to make any noise."

She nods, a little crestfallen. She makes a mental reminder to herself to ask him again tomorrow to play for her.

The most interesting part of the tour by far is the discovery of the wine cellar. Down a set of winding stone steps is a large basement underneath the house which housed not only a class selection of non-perishable food items, but also a very impressive collection of fancy alcoholic drinks.

"It's creepy down here."

Soul has to agree, although he's too busy scanning the shelf to really take notice. "Don't suppose you fancy getting pissed?"

She snorts and shakes her head.

"Do you really think that's a good idea? What if something bad happens and we need to be sharp?"

"I fight better after a glass of wine," he drawls.

She thinks that it sounds made up, but she doesn't question it. "Fine. Just one, okay? And pour me one, too. There's no way I'm going to get to sleep, otherwise."

They head upstairs after he's found a bottle of red wine he seems satisfied with, and locates two wine glasses in the kitchen cabinets, pouring the smooth red liquid into each one.

"Bottoms up," she giggles, taking a small sip and wincing. "Oh, wow. That's… stronger than I was expecting." She laughs a little nervously. "I never used to drink much."

Conversely, Soul appears to open his throat and pour the whole thing back in one. She watches with morbid fascination and it makes her giggle even more. "Aren't you supposed to make it last? Swill it about and talk about how 'earthly' it takes?"

He shrugs. "I think you mean 'earthy'. And anyway, I'm a pisshead, not a sommelier. I don't know anything about wine."

She narrows her eyes, remembering his talk about a posh upbringing, but decides that it's not worth bringing up for now. She stores it in the back of her of things to ask him about later, when they're better acquainted.

_Although, she already feels quite well acquainted,_ she thinks, after a few more sips. _And screw it, she's already made a tit of herself today._

"You were a posh boy," she starts.

He blinks at her, surprised by her boldness. "Uh…"

"You told me yourself. You grew up rich. You played the piano."

He nods. "You're not wrong."

"So why do you pretend not to be?"

He shrugs, pouring himself another small glass of wine. Despite her earlier protests, she doesn't stop him. "Well, I didn't really get along with my parents, ever. As soon as I had a reason to leave and a place to go, I left home."

"Why?" she persists.

"Like I said, I didn't get along with them."

"Where did you go, when you ran away?"

He barks a laugh and she frowns. "What's so funny?"

"It's just that you said 'ran away'."

"So what?" She's confused.

"I didn't even have to _run_. My parents were begging to be rid of me. I was the black sheep of that family. I still am, because I'm the only one that's alive."

"That's a pretty morbid thought, Soul."

"…yeah," he agrees, without much in his tone. "Goddamit," he leans his head back against the coach back and closes his eyes. "I am so freaking tired after today."

"You wanna get some rest?" she asks, but he's already asleep before the sentence is even over. "Goodnight," she says somewhat pointlessly to his already-faintly-snoring face before gently taking the empty glass from his hand and placing it onto the table on the side.

Then, she sneaks up to the master bedroom and lies, face up, eyes staring up at the ceiling.

She lets her brain run away for a few seconds, failing to all asleep while her mind drifts, creating movies just for her.


	18. Chapter 18

_"Maka, have you seen this?" her best friend, Kinsey, calls from down the hall. She zips up her jacket as she plays with the keys in the front door. "Come here, seriously you have to look at this."_

_Maybe it's the urgency in her friend's tone, but Maka's hands pause on the doorknob and she goes back, through her narrow hallway and to where Kinsey perches on the side of the couch, watching the television, holding a hot cup of coffee in both hands._

_The television blares; crackling intermittently._

_"You called me back here to see the news?"_

_"Just… look. It's getting even worse."_

_Maka sighs and perches down on one of their armchairs as the anchor woman continues her spiel._

_"…Death toll is predicted to be as high as the thousands as the virus, previously thought to be contained in Denver, appears to have spread throughout the country. Reports are showing cases as far as Mexico and Canada today. A predicted thirty-eight states now appear to be at risk, despite the containment of Denver and evacuation of neighbouring states…"_

_"Whoa," Kinsey says, her jaw slackening as the news reels off footage of containment facilities, piles of bodies, and the same clip of one of the infected gnawing on a dead person's arm that had been making the rounds on the news and internet for weeks, now._

_"Scientists have yet been unable to identify the virus, and so far no major discoveries have been made regarding the cure." The newswoman continues in a somber tone. "Reports from outside the US indicate that the pandemic may have spread globally, with several similar cases having been reported in China and one in Indonesia – however, the virus is still thought to have originated in the Midwest."_

_Maka and Kinsey share a grim look._

_"What are they advising?" Maka asks, already knowing the answer._

_"Stay inside." Kinsey doesn't tear her eyes away from the television set to answer._

_"How can we stay inside? We ran out of food yesterday."_

_Kinsey shakes her head, eyes blurring and spilling over. "I called my mom, my dad. Nether of them are picking up their phones."_

_Maka puts a sympathetic hand on Kinsey's arm. "It'll be okay, Kinsey. They'll be okay. They're probably just… out, or something."_

_"They're doctors, Maka!" she yells suddenly, dropping her mug onto the floor with a crash as it cracks in two; splinters flying up to practically eye level. Both girls flinch, but neither of them make a move to clean up the rapidly pooling brown liquid. "They're doctors in Nevada. They're dead. Or they're… they're one of them. I can just feel it."_

_"We can't waste anymore time, Kinsey. We have to go outside at some point."_

_"I don't want to die!" she wails._

_"We're going to die if we sit inside and starve!" Maka counter-argues. "You can stay in here. I'm going out to find us some food."_

_"No! No! Don't leave me inside here!" Kinsey jumps up frantically. "Where are you even going?"_

_Maka swallows. "I'm going to find some weapons. Kinsey." She says, her tone serious as she looks straight at her friends eyes. "We are going to survive this. Okay?"_

_"Maka, please!"_

* * *

"Maka!" a gruff voice calls her to light.

She's not sure when her daydream turned into an actual dream but she suddenly comes to her senses, gasping for air and realising that she was having a strange nightmare/flashback hybrid. She wipes a sheen of cold sweat from her brow and sits up to discover that Soul is now at her bedside.

He looks a little concerned.

"Uh, Maka?"

"What are you doing here? I was asleep…"

"You were yelling. I woke up to check on you."

"You woke me up," she grumbles, still groggy. "I had a bit of a nightmare. Sorry, I'm not usually a loud sleeper. Must be something about being in a house again."

Soul gestures to the bed next to her, and sits down when she nods, giving him permission. "It's alright. What were you dreaming about?"

Maka gulps in some of the cold air. "Just… just about the first few weeks of the virus spreading. I was living in my college house with a couple of friends. My best friend Kinsey and I were… watching the news."

"In your dream?"

"I think it really happened. It's hard to say if I'm misremembering it, though. I think we were watching the news, and they were evacuating Utah and New Mexico, or something." She leans back, head hitting the pillow with a defeated 'whump'. "Who knows. It doesn't matter now."

Soul doesn't ask for permission to lie next to her. "It's okay if you have nightmares. I'd say it's probably normal, given the circumstances."

"Nothing about this is normal."

"It's the new normal."

She sighs and brushes a little dust off the side of the sheet. "I just can't wait to get to Nevada and get back to civilisation, again."

Soul nods. "Just… be careful what you wish for. It's easy to spend so long alone that you forget how to be with other people."

"I know what I want, _Soul_." She scowls.

"I'm sure you do. I'm just saying… from experience." He stares at a corner of the room. "And… you should know that they're weapons, most of them. My friends in Nevada."

Maka blinks and processes this. "Okay."

"Okay? You were so angry at me earlier when I-"

"That was stupid. I was… stupid. You've saved my life more times than you've endangered it, and I was stupid for being scared," she says calmly. "I want to see."

He strokes his white stubbly beard for a second and locks eyes with her. "Are you sure?"

"Yeah. I want to see you transform, fully. Or… as fully as you want to. It's like… if I see it now, I won't be shocked when I see it later. Like ripping off a band-aid, or something."

He nods and stands up, a little tense. "You're not going to freak out?"

"I'll try, I promise." She smiles, coaxing him out.

He reaches out his arm so it's perpendicular to his body, and sudden flashes of curved white light distort her view for long enough that when they disappear, in place of his arm is a long, falcate blade emerging from his shoulder joint to the tip, which is a little longer than his extended arm would be.

She stands up too, runs a fingers along the metal and breathes sharply inwards. "Wow."

"This is nothing. I have friends that can turn into bombs, or swords."

"Soul, this is _amazing_." She pricks her finger on the tip and gasps a little, recoiling.

"Yeah, it's sharp," he chuckles.

"Can you move it?"

"Enough to slash open a zombie's face," he drawls. "I can turn any part of my body in isolation. Or I can transform fully into a scythe, but for that to work, I need someone to be operating it."

She switches her gaze to his face, making him self-conscious for a second.

"Are… you scared?" he asks.

She shakes her head, and with another white burst of weaving magical light, the blade disappears, and Soul's arm comes back into the realm of the living.

"I understand if you are," he tells her, his voice falling so it's barely above a whisper.

"I'm not. You're not scary."

"What, not even my shark teeth? Red eyes? Hair?"

"No," Maka tells him. "I never thought you looked scary. But then… I imagine that my view of scary has probably warped some since the virus broke out."

"Hmph." He shrugs. "You'd be the first."

"Wow, they really are _super_ red, aren't they?" she says, staring deeply into his crimson irises. "Have they gotten redder?"

"It's probably the light…" he replies, still keenly aware that she's staring intently at him. "Yours are olive," He tells her factually.

"Olive?" she frowns, sceptical.

"I like olives! The green kind, anyway…"

Yet another tentative silence crops up between the two of them, but it's not awkward, or heavy. Not for the first time, it enters Soul's mind that Maka was quite attractive, at least for someone who hadn't had a bath in a matter of weeks.

It's not an entirely unwelcome thought, and before he has the sense to stop himself, his arms find themselves wrapping round her waist, pulling her even closer than she was before.

Her hands respond in kind by moving upwards to cradle his face, thumbs brushing past his rough stubble, not breaking her intensive gaze at his eyes.

"Maka…" His words are a kind of warning as his eyes flit to her lips for a split second.

Then, as quickly as they'd come together, they break apart.

"W-what was that?" she asks, her voice quivering with anticipation.

He bites his lip, looking away quickly as the tension in the air between them diffuses into nothingness. "My bad."

"No… it's fine. I just… I wasn't expecting that."

They regard each other for a couple of seconds and then Soul's inscrutable expression breaks into a relaxed and easy smile. "Let's forget about it, hey? You should get some rest. I'll be on lookout?"

"Let's both just rest, come on," she yawns, her brain fuzzing as she pulls on his arm in an attempt to drag him down onto the bed. "What's the worst that's going to happen?"

There's a question that didn't bear thinking about.

* * *

Maka sleeps fitfully, occasionally waking up to the sound of something moving or rustling outside. Each time she does, she's pleasantly greeted by the cute sound of Soul's gentle snoring and the rise and fall of his chest.

"At least you're getting some sleep," she whispers to his unconscious ear.

She chalks her temporary insomnia down to nerves about this new city they're in; how everything in her life has changed in the last month or so.

And then there was, of course, the very uncool fact that he had fallen asleep right next to her.

That also made her nervous.

It makes her nervous because earlier, she'd have sworn that he'd been about to kiss her.

How stupid, she thinks. Getting attached, now that was a terrible idea. And, God forbid - what if what of them got _feelings_?

Maka's not stupid; she knows that Soul's not the type of guy who gets feelings for a girl he just met. Hell, she's only got scant evidence that he's even capable of feelings, for all his machismo and 'silent cool guy' act.

Still, he looks so young when he's asleep.


	19. Chapter 19

At some point she wakes up. With a confused and groggy noise, the first thing she realises with a start, is that Soul isn't next to her anymore.

Her anxiety gnaws at her and she sits bolt upright, suddenly very awake.

"Soul?" she calls, loudly but not loudly enough to attract any unwanted attention, if there was any. "Soul?"

Dammit. She doesn't have a gun. She locates a heavy baseball bat under the bed in the master bedroom and takes that with her, instead.

She slips quietly from the upstairs bedroom and begins to silently creep from room to room, checking each one meticulously. She about up to the downstairs kitchen area when a noise disturbs her.

Is someone climbing up the _drainpipe_?

A shiver runs through her.

"Soul?" she calls, worrying more now. Did zombies climb up drainpipes? They weren't that clever back in Colorado. But then again, they had managed to surprise her before. "C'mon, man."

It doesn't sound like Soul. Not that she's intimately acquainted with the sound of him climbing up the side of a house, mind you. It's just that whoever it is seems to be too light.

She swears to herself and then walks back upstairs, back to the foot of the stairs that lead to the attic, where the drainpipe window comes out.

She distinctly hears somebody climb through the window and fall ungracefully over on the landing below, hearing a female voice chant 'oh, shit!' before beginning to descend the stairs.

Maka grips her bat a little tighter.

"I can hear you, idiot. You'd better give up," A young, girl's voice snarls.

Maka's heartbeat thuds in her chest as the intruder rounds the corner of the stairs and she gets ready to swing her bat.

And then she freezes in place as she comes face to face with a handgun, pointed right at her face.

It's a short, stouter-built girl with a semi-automatic in one hand and her other hand casually slung in her back pocket. She snorts with laughter when she sees Maka. "Did you really think that was going to cut it?" she gestures towards the baseball bat. "Heh. You've got balls. The girls got balls, Liz!" she giggles to herself.

Maka's curious as to who she's talking to. She didn't hear another person, but she might have been mistaken.

"What do you want?" she spits.

The intruder laughs maniacally, a low cackle rising to the top. "Get down on the bed, now. Put your arms up." She instructs.

Maka's not an idiot- the girl is far better equipped than her, so she does as the interlocutor pleases. "Just tell me what you want…"

"Your weapons. All of 'em, kay?"

She breaks into a cold sweat. "They're in the truck out front."

"I don't believe you. You were just sleeping here with nothing? No weapons?" The gun-toting girl lifts her arm and Maka hears the distinct sound of a safety clicking off.

She squeezes her eyes shut and prepares for the blow; prepares for anything; prepares for the void that she's been avoiding since this whole thing first started.

It doesn't come.

Slowly, she cracks open one eye and sees it: Soul, standing behind the girl with his own handgun only metres from her temple. The girl freezes in shock as she realises her mistake, and keeps her gun trained onto Maka.

"I'll kill you," he says to her. "Put your gun down."

The girl has a wry smile fixed on her face as she slowly lowers her gun from Maka's face and points it at the ground. Soul's about to tell her something else when in a split second, she's whipped the gun back up and aimed the thing directly at his chest, squeezing the trigger before he's had a chance to aim.

There's a loud 'crack' noise.

Soul falls backwards.


	20. Chapter 20

She's barely aware of the sound her scream makes as it splinters out of her mouth, the rack of the gunshot sending her world into fractals. Drywall dust explodes out from where Soul collides against it, breaking it easily. "NO!" she half-growls, half-yells, making a sloppy grab for the girl's gun. She just bats her away without any effort and Maka slumps down, curled into the floor in a crumpled heap. "No…" she sobs. "Just kill me."

The girl laughs. "_So_. You're one of _us_, then?"

Maka frowns and looks up from her hands.

The girl is talking to Soul's body, not Maka. _Is she crazy?_ First, she's talking to _herself_ and now to…

Oh.

Out of the debris and dust of the wall he now stands up, brushes himself off with one arm. The other arm is still a long, slender snake-like blade which appeared to have deflected the bullet.

"Soul!" she yells.

Soul coughs out some of the debris and lowers his scythe arm.

"You're a weapon, too," he regards the newcomer with a sneer. "One hell of a wavelength, you got there."

"Yeah, well, you should see _mine_!" the girl giggles.

"Oh, for God's sake girl, shut up already! We obviously aren't going to win this. He's a deathscythe, for goodness' sake."

_Did that gun just talk?_

Maka's mouth is pretty much permanently open at this point. She looks at Soul for some sort of explanation and a mere squeak comes out of her mouth.

"Can somebody tell me what the hell is going on?" she demands. "Did that _gun_ just _talk_?"

"Yeah, and it has a name!" the gun sassily retorts.

She doesn't remember anything else, the last thing she remembers is Soul suddenly yelling her name before she passes out on the floor.

She's dizzy when she comes to again, her mind unfocused and her heart racing wildly.

"She's waking up," she hears a female voice croon from a chair nearby her. "Patty, grab her some water or something. We probably scared her half to death."

She panics as her vision clears and she sees the girl she came face to face with earlier, and another girl in the room with her. "Soul!" she yells.

"I'm here. Maka, it's fine. Relax." His soothing voice emanates from the couch. A quick glance at his face reveals that he's worried.

She stands up frantically and Soul rushes towards her, holding her shoulders and guiding her back down onto the chair. "Just relax. You're probably concussed."

"C-concussed…?"

"Yeah, you hit your head pretty bad back there!" an unfamiliar, new voice enters the conversation.

"Who are you?"

"I'm Liz… it's nice to meet you."

She feels woozy and looks for confirmation at Soul, who shrugs. "I just met them, too."

She grabs her head, which is throbbing and makes a groan of frustration. "My head is killing me."

"Here, have a painkiller," Liz hands her a few capsules of powdery white and the other girl, the one who had had a gun to her head a few mere minutes ago, passes a glass of water to her. Maka stares at her warily instead of thanking her, taking the glass and looking again at Soul for confirmation.

"It's fine, drink it," he nods towards her, then looks back at Liz. "She seem alright to you?"

"I'm not first-aid trained, but she doesn't have any memory loss and the bleeding stopped, so…"

"So maybe we'll wait around here for a couple days before we move on," he finishes. "You guys can feel free to stick around."

"We'll probably need your help getting to wherever it was you were talking about." Liz flips her long brown hair behind her back and Maka narrows her eyes at her. "I mean, from the way you describe it sounds like it's in the middle of nowhere."

Soul nods. "I'll take you. I'm taking her."

The scary girl giggles and Maka flinches away a few inches. "Stay away from me," she growls.

The girl just laughs. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to scare you before… I'm Patty!" she sticks out her arm as if Maka is going to shake it. Maka stares at it for a few long seconds before looking in the opposite direction.

Liz vaguely smiles at Soul, who looks sternly back. "She's not… one of us. She only found out about all of this a few days ago. Just… give her a break, okay?"

"She your little girlfriend?"

"No, she just… I just picked her up back in Colorado. She's pretty tough, considering she's not from the academy…"

"We're not 'from the academy' either, you entitled prick!" Liz seems angry, suddenly. Maka wonders if they're friends or not, she can't seem to get an idea about it.

"Okay, okay. I know. I just meant that she's not a weapon."

"W-wait," Maka speaks up, trying to understand what's going on. "You mean that these guys are… like you?"

Soul makes a face and sighs. "Yeah. They're both gun types. Remember earlier? The gun that Patty was holding was actually, uh, it was Liz."

"What? Did you _know_ them?" Maka squeaks.

"No! No. They didn't go to the academy."

Maka blinks in confusion, trying to sort this out in her brain. "So… how many of you _are_ there?"

Liz blows air out her mouth, thinking. "Not many. Enough."

"That's not an answer…" Maka begins to tell her, but then she thinks of a more pressing accusation. "Anyway, why the hell did you threaten to shoot me? Why did you shoot _Soul_? And why are you suddenly all _cool_ with each other?" she demands to know, crossing her arms.

Liz starts to answer but Soul cuts her off, deciding it would be better if he explained this.

"They were after food and weapons, Maka. Supplies are apparently scant around here. After Patty shot me and found out I was a weapon, I gave them some of our food if they stayed to help look after you. Then we got talking, and then you woke up." He raises his eyebrows. "End of story."

"So, what now?" she asks the obvious question.

"Stay here a few days while you rest," he glares at her. "-and then we're gonna keep heading to Nevada. With Liz and Patty," he adds helpfully.

She stays silent and bites her lip. "Fine." She raises her hands up in the air, deciding to trust his judgement. So far, he'd kept the two of them alive successfully. There was no reason not to trust him. And yet…

"Cool. Now, I think it's time to find something to eat…" he declares, his stomach rumbling as if to punctuate his point.

Patty licks her lips and agrees wholeheartedly with Soul.


	21. Chapter 21

Despite herself, in the next few days Maka is forced to admit that having the girls around did offer a somewhat refreshing change of pace. She'd been travelling with Soul for long enough now that she was used to his more reserved disposition, but that didn't mean it wasn't occasionally nice to have someone slightly more upbeat travelling with them.

Liz's incessant need to check out every single town and landmark and Patty's compulsion to use the toilet about fifty times a day didn't even dampen her enjoyment of the outward journey. It slowed them down, sure, but it's not like they were in a rush to get anywhere particularly quickly.

As Liz and Patty persuade Maka to outnumber Soul on the music vote for the car journey, she finds herself actually _enjoying_ singing along to some God-forsaken pop song with the two older girls (despite the fact that she'd never been much into music herself).

And not to mention, female company was very much appreciated, even if it did make Soul even more reserved than usual.

As a result, a journey that should have taken one day, according to Soul's projections, ends up taking three whole days to complete. And that wasn't even including the two-or-so days they'd spent just skulking around Salt Lake City, searching for food, medicine and weaponry. Of course, Soul had spent much of this time very concerned over Maka, who herself had been stuck in bed with a nasty headache and a mild concussion.

When they do hit the road, all piled into Soul's acquired four-by-four, they drive for around an hour at a time before the girls get bored and want to stop to see something, or find food, or just take a detour from their mostly forest-based route to some local village they've spotted on the map.

"There might be survivors there!" Liz would splutter indignantly, to which Soul would snort and recount that he doubted it very much.

On one such occasion, on their second day on the road with the girls, Soul falls asleep in the back of their truck while Maka drives, Liz in the passenger seat with a crusty old map in her lap and Patty in the back, her head poking in-between the two of them.

"He snores!" she exclaims, side-eyeing Soul who's slumped over by the blacked-out window. A quick glance to the right-wing mirror confirms it: his chest rises and falls steadily and Maka smiles at the reflection.

"He's out cold?" she asks Patty, who nods after poking the poor boy.

"Looks like it," Liz laughs. "It's kind of funny to see him so vulnerable, you know?" she giggles. "Part of me just wants to draw a moustache on him."

Patty giggles. "I don't have a pen," she sticks out her bottom lip like a child. "But I would. He looks like a baby."

Maka raises an eyebrow. "Leave him. He's tired, he's been on lookout duty pretty much every night since we found you guys, and on hunting duty pretty much every day," she points out.

"Yeah, boy needs some chill," Liz states definitively.

"Maybe after he naps, he'll be less grumpy with everybody!" Patty wonders, her eyes sparkling with glee as she stares at the boy perpendicular to her, and Maka snorts.

"He's been like that since I met him. I think that's just what he's like, honestly." She shrugs. "You get used to it."

"Really?" Liz asks her. "So, you guys get along well?" she waggles her eyebrows at Maka's direction and the younger girl grips the steering wheel with a fierce intensity.

"Yeah. We do. He saved my life a bunch of times, and he's… kept me sane, I guess. I was starting to lose it, when we met. Hallucinating, stuff like that."

"Loneliness can drive you crazy, I get it." Liz nods. "I'm lucky I got my sister with me, otherwise I'd go mad."

"You guys always travelled together?"

"We used to rob rich guys together back in Brooklyn. Then, the streets got kind of rough. We saved up some money and hopped a plane to LA. That's where we were when the virus hit."

"How is LA?"

Liz falls quiet and Patty speaks up.

"Everybody is dead there, too. Ghost town," she shudders. "More like zombie-town. It's bad, there."

Liz takes over from her sister and Maka can't help but think that they must be close, if they know when to finish each other thoughts. "We hit the road. Been travelling around west for a while. Killing zombies, letting off steam, finding ways to pass the time." She sighs. "LA… was a bad scene. There were a lot of bad people who survived the virus, people who just wanted to start gangs, kill other survivors, rape, theft… that kind of thing. It was like… it was like everyone turned into criminals the moment that society fell apart." She twiddles with her thumbs. "When we saw you and Soul, we couldn't take the chance. We wanted to screw you over before you could screw us over."

Maka shrugs. "I get it."

"Do you?" Liz asks, her question probing. She jerks her head to the back, where Soul still lies asleep. "You should be careful. Guys will take advantage of girls when all the chips are down."

She shakes her head vehemently. "No. Soul… isn't like that. I trust him. I trust him with my life." She swallows. "And I've never met anybody else I could say that about."

"So… are you guys like…?" Patty asks, smooshing the tips of her two forefingers together to indicate… well, _something_. Maka herself isn't entirely sure what she's insinuating.

"No!" she blushes furiously, eyes darting once again to the dirty road in front of them. "Not at all. We're just travelling together." She focuses on their surroundings, ignoring the look that Liz and Patty share. At that point, Liz pulls a tube of lip balm from her jacket pocket and starts to apply it in the rearview mirror.

"Well, if you're not interested then _I_ just might be. If you really trust him that much, he _must_ be a good guy. And he's good-looking. A little rough-around-the-edges for my tastes, but he looks around my age and I haven't had any action in _months_."

Maka makes a forced attempt to stop gripping the steering wheel with her vicelike claws, and a concerted effort to make her voice sound casual when she replies. "Go ahead," she replies permissively. "I'm sure he wouldn't say no to a girl like you."

She turns up the volume of the speaker blasting out Britney Spears before Liz can say another word.

* * *

Patty blows air out of her lips like a horse. "Psh. I'm bored, guys. Somebody talk about something," she demands.

Liz and Maka share a look, a secret smirk at Patty's expense. The girl really was just like a young child, despite being older than Maka by a year. "Uh, okay," Maka thinks on her feet. "If you guys could travel anywhere in the world, where would you travel and why?"

Patty answers immediately. "I'd go to Disneyland, Florida!" she exclaims in excitement. "I tried to convince Lizzy to go there before, but she said it was too far…"

"That, and I'm not sure the rides will actually be in commission anymore, hun," Liz shrugs with a smile. "It would have been cool to go while it was still working though, huh? Did either of you guys ever go?"

"No," Soul replies, still fixated on the road ahead, barely listening.

"No, I never did. I lived in Maine my whole life, and then went and studied in Colorado," she looks wistfully out the window. "Florida is pretty much the further spot from either of those states," she laughs. "Liz, how about you?"

Liz thinks for a second, but she knows the answer to this one. "Oh, Paris. Definitely Paris," she smiles serenely. "I want a guy to take me on a date at the top of the Eiffel tower, maybe hand me a single rose on a warm July night…" she daydreams. "A single saxophonist could serenade us with some romantic blues as we pick at our hors d'oeuvres and he tells me how radiant I look in my sparkling red Chanel suit."

Soul snorts out loud, only apologising after Liz sends him a mean look. "Sorry, sorry," he laughs through his apology, making it sound a little less sincere. "I just… imagine how sweaty you would be after all those steps," he shares a grin with Maka in the rearview mirror and Liz folds her arms.

"What's your idea of romance then, Soul?" she asks a little petulantly.

He grimaces. "None, ideally."

"Ever dated anybody? Liz has dated lots of guys."

"Not seriously, no," Soul answers honestly. "And to the previous question… I would visit Slovakia."

There's a silence in the car.

"_Slovakia_?" Liz repeats. "What the hell is worth visiting in Slovakia?!"

Soul shrugs. "Culture. Music. History. Architecture. Amazing natural beauty," he reels off. "Or Cologne, in Germany. Official city of Jazz," he says triumphantly.

The sureness of his answer makes Maka smile. "That's cool. I've heard nice things about Ljubljana," she says sweetly in response.

"Bless you!" Liz jokes, laughing. "Well, I've never been to Slovakia. But I've been to Cologne and I have to say… it was worth every penny. I loved all the live jazz shows, especially the ones where guys would practically pour the german beer down my throat…" she smiles serenely and envisages a better time.

Maka tries to meet Soul's eyes again in the rearview mirror but he's looking at Liz. "Oh, man, I'm so jealous. I would have loved to see the live jazz, back when everyone was alive."

"Well, for all we know they're fine in Europe…" Liz theorises, but Maka interrupts.

"No way are they fine in Europe. The virus wasn't contained properly, it spread everywhere. No continent of the world was safe. Except for maybe some crazy isolated old island, everyone's infected."

"Not us," Patty retaliates.

Maka sighs. "Yeah, not us…" she looks back out the window.

Trees fly past her in her peripheral vision and she focuses hard on ignoring the chit-chat that continues without her as she lets her mind drift away.

* * *

"Reno! Biggest Little City in the World," Liz announces proudly, waking Maka up from her slumber.

She rubs her eyes, groggy and tired. She looks around at their surroundings and frowns. "Are we here…?"

"Yep!" Liz beams.

"Biggest little city… that's cute. Did you make that up, sis?"

"Nope!" Liz exclaims. "It's on that billboard," she takes one hand off the steering wheel to point out in the distance. All four passengers follow her finger and Patty hums in appreciation.

"Oh, right," she shrugs.

Soul frowns. "Hey, you know the fuel tank is empty?" he tells Liz.

Liz looks at it and swears. "Shit!" she says angrily. "I thought that red light was flashing because somebody wasn't wearing a seatbelt!"

Soul blinks at her slowly, like she's stupid, and then Maka watches his jaw set as they all stare ahead.

In front of them, for what stretches on for miles and miles, is gridlocked traffic. Rows and rows and rows of cars sit idle; growing rust and moss from between the seats.

"Not like we're going anywhere, anyway," Liz comments. "Damn, and I thought the highway was bad on the way here."

"Reno was near ground zero…" Maka says under her breath. She fiddles with the door handle as Liz rolls to an eventual stop, getting out from her seat to stare at the horizon. "We're almost in town. Should we find somewhere to stay on foot?" she asks Soul.

He gets out too, leans on the bonnet of the car. "Christ," he says, running a hand through his hair, before turning to Liz. His white face tells Maka that they're in trouble. "I don't want to go anywhere on foot. How are we gonna carry our supplies? If ground zero was near here, you can bet they're going to be shit out of food."

Liz and Patty share a look and Maka tries to come up with a plan. "Let's carry as much as we can, okay? We'll find somewhere, just for tonight, and we'll move first thing tomorrow."

Soul swears and kicks the dirt. "This wouldn't be a problem if I was on my motorcycle…" he mutters to himself, beginning to drag out weapons from the trunk of the car. "C'mon, I'll carry guns, Maka – you can take ammo. Liz and Patty, you guys wanna split up the rest of the water and the cans?"

Liz grumbles, loading up her backpack with green beans. "I didn't sign up for this…" She makes a disgusted face at a particularly gross-looking expired can of sprouts and throws it back into the trunk. "This survivor's colony had better be worth it."


	22. Chapter 22

They trudge in the blistering heat for what feels like hours, until the sun starts to go down and Soul starts to walk with a sense of urgency in his step.

"It's getting dark, Soul," Maka says warningly. "I don't want to be out here when it's dark."

"They get scary when it gets dark," Patty makes a frowny face. "They get cleverer, faster."

Soul keeps walking. "Let's just keep going, okay? There are probably some places we can stay just around the corner."

The moon starts to appear in the sky and Maka's heart thuds faster. "Soul…" she says warningly.

He stops them abruptly in the road, with all three women rather comically bumping into one another like dominoes. There's a spooky silence as Soul suddenly freezes stock still, listening for something.

Maka hears it before he does, too. Something is running, something near them.

In a second, all four travellers have their battle faces on; ready to fight whatever is coming. Soul hands Maka one of the guns slung over his shoulder, creeping forward. A flash of light appears at the tip of his right deltoid as he partially transforms; the same flash of light which consumes Patty's entire being as she becomes a deadly hunk of steel in her sister's grasp.

Almost as quickly as the noise had become apparent, the threat does, too.

There's a bloodcurdling screech as what must be dozens of the creatures suddenly leap out from behind cars; from the shadows; from the trees around them – charging wildly with their limping frames and unkempt hair.

"LIZ, MAKA, GET IN THE CAR!" Soul yells out, jerking his thumb towards a red four-by-four which was sitting on the road. Liz yanks open the nearby door and practically hurls herself inside, beginning to take shots at the zombies as they approach Soul and Maka, still standing in the road; vulnerable to attack. "Maka, you too!" he yells frantically as the first few zombies reach him. He swings his blade around skilfully, decapitating two in one shot as more fly out towards his blade.

One rabid zombie flies at his throat and Maka quickly takes aim, curdled zombie blood spattering all over his face as she takes the shot. "I want to help you!"

"You're too –" he slices through another oncoming attack, cutting the zombie in two equal pieces. "Vulnerable!" he spits out.

Maka takes two more shots; only one of them landing as Soul "You'll die!"

Soul's entire leg turns into a blade and he jumps in the air, stabbing it through the creatures chest and back out again, while his other hand gets busy with his handgun. "Dammit!" he swears, as three zombies attack at once. He slices two cleanly, but the other one grabs onto Maka's arm.

She screams out loud and Soul yells something which sounds suspicious like 'FUCK YOU!' as Maka watches the zombie hand in question become suddenly detached from it's arm, courtesy of Soul's yellow and black blade.

Something in her mind snaps, and she finds herself reaching back and punching the zombie who had tried to bite her arm full in the face. It feels strangely good, and it provides impetus for her to make the next two headshots perfectly.

Behind her, Liz is still busy pumping round after round of… well, something, at the crowd of zombies on the other side of the red car – which at least keeps their workload manageable.

Just when she thinks that they might get through this alive, one of the zombies suddenly leaps out of nowhere, foaming at the mouth as it launches headfirst at Soul, knocking him back onto the ground.

In a second, her trigger is trained on it, while Soul's hands wrap around it's neck and attempt to choke it to death.

She takes the shot, and the zombie falls dead on the floor – but that's not what concerns her. The things that concerns her is the noise of agony that emits from Soul a split second after the takes the shot.

"Oh, crap," Liz says to herself, having watched the incident from the corner of her eyes. "Dammit, Maka, guard him! I'll take these guys!" she leaps out from the cover of the car and both girls now transform into half-gun, half-girl.

Behind their endless torrent of fire, Maka rushes up to Soul, who sits up and clutches his stomach in disbelief. "You gutshot me, woman," he grumbles in an agonising register.

"I'm so sorry, Soul. And I promise you, we're gonna sort you out. You're gonna be fine. But for now… we have to finish these guys off," she bites her lip, trying not to look at the pooling blood from his stomach injury. "Can you fight?"

He nods, letting himself be dragged up by Maka. He slumps over, half his weight supported by her as his arm drapes round her shoulder.

She struggles to keep shooting under half his weight, but to his credit his stabilises himself, his arm still around her, and with the other one transforms again.

This time, his blade doesn't just slice cleanly through the zombie. This time, hid blade shoots out a shockwave of bright, white light from it's tips. It radiates out like a rapid soundwave in a split second; obliterating the zombies in its path and shuddering all the way through Maka's chest.

It disappears somewhere off in the distance and all three women stop their shooting and stare at Soul in disbelief.

There's a eerie silence which suddenly replaces the sounds of gunshots, zombie groaning and screaming.

"What the hell was that?"

Soul stares at his un-transformed arm. "I have no idea," he says bluntly.

Maka reaches out a tentative hand and pokes him, to no avail. "What are you doing?"

"Did that come from _you_?"

"It looked like your soul wavelength," Patty makes a face. "But that's impossible… without a partner…" she frowns.

Soul stares at himself for another few seconds, and then his eyes trail up to Maka. He's about to say something, but at that moment they seem to all remember in unison that Soul's blood is currently staining his shirt, and the floor, bright red.

"We gotta get him inside!" she exclaims, still supporting a half-hobbling Soul as she beckons to Liz and Patty to follow. "Liz, some help?" she asks. Liz takes the other half of Soul's weight by throwing his left arm over her shoulder and they carry him the next mile or so, at least until they find an old motel.

"Here we are," Maka announces, breathless along with Liz as she looks over at the hurt man they've been carrying for the last twenty minutes. "Soul?" she asks, but he's unconscious. "Dammit," she cries, kicking open the door with a swift blow from her boot. She lays him down on the floor, with Liz's help, and tears off her button-up shirt, wrapping it round his waist.

Then, she inspects his wound. It's deep, but not vital-organ deep. She breathes a sigh of relief as she leans back and wipes her brow. "It just brushed past his skin. He's going to be okay."

"Then why is he passed out right now?" Liz wonders.

"Could be delayed shock? Plus, I'm not sure how much blood he lost…" she grimaces. "We'd better get the bullet out and then wrap it up again. Patty, can you see if there's anything long and pointy I can get the bullet out with? Liz, please can you search to see if there's any alcohol at the bar we can sterilize with…" her eyes flit back to Soul as the two girls run off at her command. "Please be okay, Soul…" she whispers to him.

Liz finds some rubbing alcohol and Patty finds some tweezers and a first aid kit.

However, the biggest success of the evening is that Liz and Patty manage to find and turn on the backup electricity generator in the basement – so they actually enjoy some light.

After a brief celebration of the rare joys of discovering working electricity, Maka gets to work. She doesn't find a bullet – it must have grazed past him instead of lodging inside – so she begins to clean the wound, dabbing at it with a little rubbing alcohol.

He wakes up halfway through. It's not surprising, because it must hurt like hell. Understandably, he yells and tenses up his stomach, which makes him yelp harder.

"Ssh, ssh," she tells him, squeezing his hand. "It's gonna hurt, Soul. I'm sorry. I've got to clean this out and stitch it up so this doesn't get infected." She pauses. "I wish I had some anaesthetic…" she stops, looking closely at the wound she's cleaned up. "You're going to need stitches. I have a first aid kit here, so I can give you sutures now…"

"Fine," he growls and lies back down, wincing as he does so. He then yelps out again when she dabs a second time.

"I'm sorry," she apologises. "This is going to hurt a hell of a lot." She tells him factually, before piercing the first part of his skin for the sutures.

"Tell me you've done this before," he asks, closing his eyes.

"I've practiced on pig-skin before. It was something my father taught me, but I've never… I've never had to actually do it on a person, before."

Liz and Patty share a look.

He cries out as she links together the first two parts of his skin, and the cry turns into a gasping sound as he inhales.

"Maka," he says, out of breath from all the pain. She pauses and looks up at him. "I need something to bite down on." He says through his teeth. "So I don't break all the bones in your hand."

"Oh!" she raises her eyebrow. She hands him the shirt that she'd wrapped him up in, earlier. "Bite on this."

The ordeal lasts about twenty minutes, after which Maka hands Soul the rubbing alcohol – which he proceeds to pour down his throat. "Jesus."

"You feel okay?"

"No." he shakes his head. "Any painkillers in that first aid kit?"

"None."

"Dammit. And I think we left our supply behind," he curses, pouring the last of the rubbing alcohol into his mouth and then throwing the bottle away. "_God_, that burns." He touches his throat.

Liz stares after it. "You know that there's whiskey behind the bar of this place, right?"

"FUCK!"


	23. Chapter 23

"Okay, okay. My turn!" Patty clasps her hands together and squeals. "My question is for Maka, this time." She grins, and Maka's stomach sinks in anticipation. "Tell me… fuck, marry, kill: Tom Cruise, Keanu Reeves, George Clooney."

Maka rolls her eyes. "Really, Patty?"

"Yup!" Patty laughs. "I thought the rules were that we could ask _any_ question to anyone?"

Maka sighs. Patty does have a point. She had thought up this dumb game as a way to keep Soul occupied, and also kill some time while they got to know each other better. She hadn't expected so many questions about having sex with guys, but then… well, it had worked. In a way. She feels like she knows _Liz_ a lot better, now, at least…

"Probably… I'd marry Keanu Reeves. Fuck George Clooney. Kill Tom Cruise."

Patty blinks. "What's your reasoning?"

"You only get one question!" Maka exclaims and Patty shakes her head.

"No, the reasoning is implied with fuck, marry, kill. You know that!"

Maka rolls her eyes. "Keanu Reeves seems like a cool dude, George Clooney is super hot in that sexy older man kind of way-"

"Preach it, sister," Liz chants in the background. Maka ignores her.

"-And Tom Cruise is a scientologist, so…" she trails off. "Hey, I wonder if _that's_ still a thing," she ponders to herself. "Anyway. My question is to Liz."

"Hit me!"

"What's your favorite movie?" she smiles, going for the kosher questions as ever.

"When Harry Met Sally."

"How uncool," Soul grins at her, still cradling the bottle of whiskey Liz had procured earlier. He's soundly drunk, which Maka would find amusing, were it not for the fact that she'd worried that he'll pop his stitches. "Out of all the incredible movies ever made, you would seriously pick a rom-com?" he asks her, teasingly.

Liz opens her mouth, outraged. "Yes, actually. It's a fantastic and nuanced expression of romance between two people who love each other not only as friends, but as…" she trails off, and scowls. "Don't roll your eyes, Soul! Have you even watched it?"

"Don't need to, all rom-coms are the same,"

"Well, usually I'd agree with you but When Harry Met Sally is different. It was the rom-com. It's the movie that all rom-coms aspire to be." She informs him snootishly, sticking her nose in the air. "You're clearly just emotionally stunted, like all men.

He grins. "Except Harry, from the movie, presumably?"

"Actually," Liz corrects. "He's pretty useless too." She laughs. "Tell me, Soul, as it's my question: when's the last time you cried?"

"_Hah_! Just now, when Maka did my stitches." He puts the bottle to his lips and takes another swig, as if just talking about the mere experience was enough to make him want to drink. "You lose."

It's Liz's turn to roll her eyes. "Gimme that, I want some." She steals the whiskey bottle from him and takes a glug, wincing afterwards. "Jesus." She coughs. "I meant when's the last time you cried from _emotion_?"

"Too late. No do-overs. We established that," Soul grins, triumphant. "And… my question is to Patty." He sends Liz a side-eye and grabs the bottle back. "What's the most embarrassing thing Liz has done while she's drunk?"

Patty giggles. "Probably that bartender from Eggplant who turned out to be thirty and live with his mom!" she says in a sing-song as Liz splutters, squeezing the bridge of her nose with her forefinger and thumb.

"Jesus, Patty."

"Well, we _are_ playing truth!" she protests. "Anyway, what happened to the dare part of the game?"

Maka interrupts. "We, uh, realised that it would be too dangerous to play dares. Especially as our lives are already in danger enough as it is?"

Patty sniffs. "Fair point. Still, though…" she hesitates. "Soul!" she yells out suddenly, in her playful voice, pointing to the spiky-white-haired invalid. "Screw! Marry! Kill!" she punches her fists in the air with each word. "Me, Liz, Maka!"

Soul groans. "Really? I have to piss at least _one_ of you off, if not all _three_…" he grumbles. "I'd kill… I'll kill Patty, screw… Liz," he eventually settles on. "Sorry, Patty," he sniggers and Patty shrugs as if she couldn't possibly care.

"Why?"

"No follow-up questions!" he barks, Patty dissolving into giggles.

Maka can't help but notice the way that Liz has been looking at Soul all night.

* * *

They do eventually get tired. Soul makes some excuse and then limps away to some bedroom on the ground floor where he all-but-collapses onto the bed, still clutching his stomach.

Maka follows, finding her own room and Liz and Patty do the same not shortly after.

Being in a motel, there's no shortage of spare rooms, at least, after they've found the master key from inside the hotel reception. Liz had to bust it open with her gun, but they managed eventually.

Soul, for all his trauma, can't manage to get to sleep. His eyes are tired but he stares listlessly up at the ceiling from his double bed. His feet dangle off the end and he briefly wonders if he's too tired and drunk to take his socks off.

Turning his head to the side, he wonders if Maka's asleep, yet.

He thinks about today, realises that it's the first time he's had to fight off an attack like that since… well, since the outbreak. Since his academy days, at least.

It begs the question – _is he safer travelling alone? Was Maka safe under his protection?_

_Come of think of it, she'd saved his life today. Was Maka even under his protection at all?_

He groans and rolls over, but not before he hears a light knock on his door.

He cautiously stands up, still holding onto his stitches, and pads over to the door.

"Hello?" he says on the other side. "Come in,"

"Just me," Liz's confident Brooklyn drawl comes back to him. He feels a pang of something, disappointment, perhaps?

He opens the door anyway, and she all but struts into his room. "Can I sit down?" she asks, not waiting for an answer either way before she plonks herself freely down on his bed. "I couldn't sleep. _And_ I'm a little drunk."

"Ah… ditto. On both accounts."

"Wondered if you fancied a nightcap with me?" she asks, procuring a bottle of blue liquid from behind her back with a flirty smile. "Patty doesn't drink and Maka didn't really strike me as the sort…" she trails off, shrugging.

He eyes the bottle suspiciously, raising a brow. "Is that _Gatorade_?"

"It's blue curacao…" she explains. "Don't look at me like that! There's practically no other alcohol left."

He laughs and takes the bottle, twisting off the cap and taking a swig of its contents. "Hah. Better than some of the prison hooch I've had to resort to before."

Liz laughs and touches him on the forearm as he sits down on the bed next to her. "Give me some," she reaches for the bottle and follows his lead, wrinkling her nose up after she's poured some of the liquid down her throat. "Jeez. That really is bad," she passes it back to him.

"Lightweight," he laughs and then winces, touching his sides. "Ow," he says, and then continues to chuckle. "I'm kind of drunk. Ssh. Don't tell Maka, okay?" he sloppily puts a finger over his lips and then stumbles, half-falling off the bed.

Liz yelps and grabs him before the arm before he goes tumbling on his side, just about managing to save him. "Christ, Soul. I didn't see you drink _that_ much of the whiskey…"

"I, uh, had about half the bottle. Not to mention the rubbing alcohol," he scratches his head. "I also think I'm about a quart low of blood right now, so don't question my drinking skills," he points a finger at Liz, teasing her.

"Yikes. Maybe I shouldn't be bringing you more booze!"

"Yeah, you're like some kind of…" he trails off, deep in thought.

She leans a little closer to him. "Kind of what?"

"…booze concubine."

Liz laughs and takes another quick swig, wiping her mouth on her sleeve. "Better than a regular concubine, I guess."

Soul doesn't lean back and smiles, his expression a little faraway. "I don't know. I get pretty lonely these days. Might be nice to have a concubine or two," he jokes.

There's a ringing silence that follows that sentence, and both Liz and Soul simultaneously realise what they've just said.

In the next second, or maybe the one after, she leans into him. Melds her mouth to his.

She's soft and tentative, at first, but his hand snaking around her waist is the confirmation that she needs to deepen their kiss, tangling her fingers in his hair and letting her alcoholic, blue-tinged lips move against his.

She's practiced at this. So is he, but Liz has him beat. Her hand drops down to his waist and her fingers deftly begin to unbuckle his belt.

He finds himself leaning into it – until Liz parts from his mouth to focus on undressing him, and his head falls back against the pillow. "Liz," he takes his chance to stop her. Before this becomes something else. Before he doesn't _want_ to stop her.

"What?" she pauses her fingers movements and her big brown eyes flicker to his dark crimson ones. "You a eunuch or something?"

He sighs. "I wish."

"So… what's wrong, Casanova?"

"I don't want…" He bites his tongue, a frustrated sigh escaping him. "Obviously, I want to. I just… I don't think _now_ is…" he trails off, unsure of exactly what excuse he's trying to conjure up.

Liz eyes him. "Are you gay?" she asks, but then cuts him off. "No, no. That _kiss_ wasn't exactly gay." She cocks her head to the side. "Oh," she says suddenly, reading his inscrutable expression. "_Maka_?" she suddenly announces. "It's Maka, isn't it?"

Apparently, Soul is a second too late in spluttering his indignant 'no' because Liz pounces on him like a pussycat. She's struck gold, if her expression is anything to go by. "I'm right, aren't I?" she hesitates. "Well, she's certainly pretty. A little skinny but, if that's your type, I guess…" she wrinkles up her nose.

Soul groans and his head smacks down against the pillow once more. "Shit, Liz." He makes a noise of frustration into the pillow, and then, quieter: "Just don't say anything to her, please."

"Hah!" Liz grins like the Cheshire cat as her suspicions are confirmed. "I won't. Don't worry."

There's a silence. "Sorry," he mutters, a little embarrassed. "I mean, you're… you're like _super_ hot. I totally would, in any other circumstance."

She laughs. "High praise! You _must_ be drunk." She leans forward as he sits up. "Still, it's a shame. You're cute, and I'm bored. Just one more, okay? For me?"

He blinks, not sure what she's talking about until she leans forward and plants another kiss on his lips. This one isn't quite chaste but it's not quite the same as the others, either. It's something in-between, something that lacks definition.

Then, as quickly as she had come in and tipped his world on its side, she exits quietly, taking her blue bottle of Dutch courage with her.

"Night, Soul,"

"G'night."

The door clicks shut almost silently behind her, and he ponders whether that last kiss had been because Liz was lonely, too.

He drifts off after the minutes tick by quietly.

_His head swirls with errant thoughts because in his dreams, he's kissing Liz again. It's almost pleasant, except she morphs into Maka after a few seconds which catches him off guard. He enjoys the feel of kissing her, instead, for a couple of seconds, before Maka's mouth suddenly morphs into a decaying one as her lips fall off right in front of him._

_He recoils away too late, sees the zombie head that was Maka a few seconds ago, was Liz a few seconds before that – sees the sharp, pointed fangs; not unlike his own; open wide and sink down deep into his neck flesh._

He wakes with a jolt. "Yikes," he says to nobody but himself, running a hand through his floppy head. It comes away drenched in his own sweat.

Thoughts buzz around in his head for a few minutes and he groans, massages his head to try and somehow get them out. "What the hell is _in_ curacao?" he wonders absently, stretching up and getting onto his feet at the side of the bed.

He pads over to the door and out into the hallway, his eyes shifting from door to door.

_Which room did Maka go into?_

He tries one, a dark brown door with the door number 2 etched into it.

He immediately spies a large mass of very blonde hair, so he quickly backtracks, closing the door quietly. Then, after carefully pushing open door 3, he's surprised when he sees Maka – sitting bolt upright and awake in bed with her nose in a book.

She looks equally as surprised to see him but puts her book down and places a hand over her lips.

He shuts the door behind him and sneaks towards her bed as she beckons him to sit on the edge. "Are you okay?" she whispers.

"Yeah. I just… I wondered if you were asleep."

"I couldn't sleep, honestly," she admits, gesticulating to her book.

"Seems like there's a lot of that going around," he nods. "What-cha reading?"

"Oh, uh. Ulysses. James Joyce. I'm having a hell of time with it, actually…" she says quickly, clamping it shut and reading his expression. "I know, I know. I'm a nerd. But… it helps me relax." She pauses, taking a closer look at Soul as her eyes adjust. "Are you drunk?"

"As a _skunk_," he laughs, with a contradictory frown plastered on his features. "Liz came in my room earlier," he says with a sigh, taking the liberty of shuffling around and lying himself down on the opposite side of the bed to Maka.

She follows him with her eyes; stares at him like he's grown four heads. "I've never seen you this friendly. Ever."

He shrugs. "Well, I _am_ wasted."

"Why?" she presses on.

"Why not? Why do anything?" he questions, throwing his arms up in the air, then answers his own question. "_Because_. Today sucked ass, and my stomach fucking hurts." He cracks one eye open to look at her. "Thanks for the stitches, by the way. You're awesome."

Maka smiles and places her book on the side table. "Well, thanks for saying it. I was just repaying my debt of honor, honestly." She grins, before a big yawn overcomes her features. "Come on. We should get some sleep."

"Maka, can I sleep in here?" he murmurs, suddenly feeling very tired. "I just… I kept having weird dreams before."

She hides the fact that she finds him oddly endearing, all drunk and vulnerable like this, and pretends to be grudging as she nods. "Fine, Soul." She pauses. "But… I'm just wearing this shirt, and my underwear. So…"

"It's fine," he mumbles, barely registering her words. As if to prove something, he toes off his shoes and wriggles drunkenly out of his pants, kicking them to the floor when they reach his ankles. "Now I am, too."

She stifles a giggle. "What's gotten _into_ you?"

"Blue curacao," he answers cryptically, almost in a whisper.

"Oh?" she does a double take.

"Liz brought some to my room, earlier," he trails off, whispering something quietly to himself. "…ooze concubine…"

Maka blinks, confused. She shuffles down further in the bed and continues to listen to Soul's strange monologue, even going so far as to rest her head on his chest. She feels it vibrate with a pleasant hum as he speaks. Or rather, _mumbles_ sweet nothings.

"We were drinking the blue shit. Apparently, it was the only thing left over. And then, uh, we kissed. Which was weird as hell, because I thought she didn't like me. But, then, I _always_ think that."

Maka's heart beats a little faster. "You kissed… Liz?" she asks, her voice coming out a little higher than she had intended.

"Well, kinda. She sorta kissed me. I guess. I didn't really want to."

"You didn't?" Maka asks, her eyes raising with apparent surprise.

"Well, don't get me wrong. Liz is hot," he drawls.

"So…?"

"Eh," he shrugs. "She's not you, though."

She opens her mouth to reply, and then closes it again, thoughtfully. There's a silence as Maka digests that information.

_She's not you? What on earth did that mean?_

_Did that mean that Soul had feelings for her? Hadn't that been exactly what they'd wanted to avoid before?_

_And if he did, why did he act so indifferent to her all the time?_

She blushes, gathering up the guts to ask more.

However, she's foiled by the familiar faint sound of his snoring emanating from his side of the bed.

She sighs, supposing that it will have to wait for tomorrow, or more realistically probably _never_.

In the meantime, in the off chance that she never gets to do this again, she snuggles further into the apex of his neck, disproportionately enjoying the feeling of his arm snaked around her waist.


	24. Chapter 24

He wakes up with a banging headache. She wakes up shortly after, as morning floods unwanted sunlight in the window. A second ticks by, and it dawns on him that he's currently _spooning_ Maka, for lack of a better word.

He briefly considers his options, and realises that they're limited to two things: he can either make a fuss and move away from her, probably waking her up… or, he can pretend to be asleep. As tempting as the second option is, and it's very tempting considering how comfortable he is – he settles on the first.

"Maka," he coughs, rolling onto his back.

She groans. "What?"

"You're awake?"

"Yes," she replies tersely. "I'm tired," she states simply. She rolls over and grabs his hand; pulls it back over his waist. She's too skinny, he worries as he feels her hipbones jutting out to the side.

They'd need to find something to eat, first thing.

Well, _second_ thing, perhaps.

"Okay," he says pliantly, letting himself be essentially curled back over Maka without any further complaint.

* * *

"What's the plan today, then?" Patty asks once all parties are officially up and out of their respective beds. "I don't know about you guys, but I slept _soooo_ good." She stretches up and a big yawn reveals her tongue for a few seconds, illustrating her point.

Soul coughs. "Me, uh. Too," he scratches his head, feeling the eyes of two of the three women boring holes through his skull. He shakes it off. "So, uh. I was gonna say we should stay here for a few more nights, but I think considering yesterday – we should get transport out of here as soon as possible."

Maka pulls a small folded piece of paper from her pocket and unfurls it into a large map. "Look what I found!" she exclaims. She lays it out at everyone's feet for them to see and jabs a finger at a random location in the Nevada black rock desert. "And if I'm not mistaken, right here is where we can find some hot springs to wash off and chill out before we head to the colony."

"Oh, you're a queen. I haven't cleaned myself in ages." Liz runs her hands through her greasy hair to demonstrate her point. "But… are we going to have enough gas to get us there and to the academy? You gotta figure that there's probably not gonna be any way we can re-fuel or re-vehicle in the middle of the damn desert," she points out.

Maka does some mental gymnastics as she tries to work out the average fuel consumption rate per mile crossed with the average fuel-holding capacity of a truck.

Soul cuts her off. "I think so."

"We really gotta be more than just '_I think so'_ sure, don't you think?" Liz puts a hand on one bony hip.

Soul shrugs, and looks at Maka. "What do you think?"

Maka bites her lip. "I… I think we'll be alright. And I think we should take a backup vehicle. Just in case we break down – I really don't need to be stuck in the blistering desert without any way of getting anywhere."

"Good idea!" Patty giggles. "Maka, you're good at this."

She grimaces. Maka knows she's good at planning and strategy. What she's not good at is feeling like she's responsible for other people's lives.

She's on edge the entire drive to the hot springs, that much is clear to Soul. At first, he'd assumed that it was being on the back of his motorcycle, but then he'd remembered how much she'd enjoyed it the first time.

He briefly wonders if it's because of the conversation that they'd had while he'd been drunk in the hotel.

He shakes that idea off quickly.

_Worrying about the past wasn't cool,_ he tells himself. _And he was nothing if not infinitely cool._

"You all good back there?" he calls for what seems like the fourteenth time.

She calls back with a quick 'yep' and Soul keeps on driving, not missing a beat.

He wasn't entirely sure how long this motorbike would hold out, but he already misses his orange Buell. This one's a red standard Yamaha they picked up back in Reno. It would have been fine, but the steering kept awkwardly locking up.

If he was taking this to the academy, he figured that he'd have to make some adjustments.

He's used to driving a motorbike, so he lets his mind wander freely for a couple of miles as Liz follows him a little _too_ closely in the black Jeep.

He thinks about the academy.

He wonders what will have changed since the last time he was there; how different the people will be. _Who will be gone, and who will be new?_

He thinks of the last time he'd seen most of them, and shudders.

_Would they even have him back?_

He briefly wonders how possible it would be to simply drop Maka, Liz and Patty at the front gates and do a runner.

For at least a mile or two, he entertains himself with a vague sort of idea – how he would go about getting the girls safely to the academy without actually having to physically interact with anybody from the old days.

He even comes up with a semi-lucid plan of action.

"Turn off here, Soul!" he hears Maka chant from behind him.

He chuckles inwardly. The girl was an excellent navigator, that much had to be said.

He focuses for a fleeting second on the feeling of Maka's arms wrapped around his waist, leaning into him for support and gripping just a little tighter around every bend.

And then a sigh escapes him, because he knows that for all his plans, he's not going to leave her side now.

* * *

"Quit _splashing_ me!" Patty growls at her sister, splaying out hands to return the favour and consequently soaking her sister with steaming water from the spring.

Liz throws back her head and cackles, responding by shooting even more water at her sister in a big wave gesture. "No! You did it first, anyway!"

Patty crosses her arm across her chest and sulks – a comical scene, as water plasters her hair to her scalp and drips down her pouting face. "My hair is ruined."

"So is mine!"

Soul sniggers, watching them out of the corner of his eye from the other end of the spring. He is submerged until his top lip, just about allowing him space to breathe while still having most of his aching muscles soothed by the warm water.

Out of the other corner of his eyes, he can see Maka. She's sitting at the edge of the spring, only her toes dipped in, reading her book.

"Maka," he raises his mouth from the water for just long enough to call. "Are you coming in?"

She glances up at him and then shakes her head. "Nope." Her eyes flicker back to the pages of her novel and Soul lets out an exasperated sigh.

He floats over to where she's perched and drags himself out of the spring, sitting on the marshy bank next to his sulking companion. "Is everything okay?"

Her eyes flicker up from her book again and she snaps it shut, irritated. "Yes. Quit asking."

"You don't seem okay…"

"I don't want to swim, Soul!" she snaps. "I don't know if the water here is… is…"

"It's fine, Maka," he furrows his brows. "It's hot enough to kill any bacteria or virus. Seriously, this is probably the cleanest water we're going to find around, except for maybe a running stream," he narrows his eyes. "But you _know_ that, don't you?"

She scowls, looking very intently at a spot that isn't his burning eyes. "I don't… I don't want to undress," she murmurs, an embarrassed, scowling blush spreading through her pretty features.

To his credit, Soul doesn't laugh. "So, don't," he says, shrugging. "I'm still wearing my shorts," he points out. "Just because Liz and Patty wanted to get naked, doesn't mean _you_ gotta."

"You should join us, Maka!" Liz waves over from the other side of the spring. She can't hear their conversation, presumably.

Maka shifts uncomfortably. "Should I?"

"If you want," Soul shrugs. "It's nice."

She sighs, placing her book to the side of her and slowly lowering herself into the spring with a hiss. Her arm stings a little upon entry, but it's not too bad. The warmth spreads quickly through her body and she can't help herself; a contented sigh escapes her lips before she can reign it in.

Soul watches her with wide eyes. "Feel better?"

"Oh, God, yes," she practically moans. "Jesus, why didn't you tell me it was this good?!" she demands as the water rises to her waist level.

Soul doesn't reply, simply sending her an amused look with his eyes. She lowers herself to the neck and feels her feet hit the ground beneath.

"Yay!" Liz cries out. "You did it!" she cheers, as Patty claps and whoops. "Isn't it _orgasmic_?"

"Wouldn't go that far…" Maka mumbles, still not over the worst of the embarrassment. She moves around and suddenly, her footing slips on the mossy bank of the floor, and she splashes forward.

Against his better instincts, Soul's arms reach out to her waist to steady her. They linger there a little while after she's found her footing, and she finds herself drawn into his eyes as his hands stay around her.

"Er, sorry," she breaks eye contact first. "Gotta be more careful, I guess."

Soul removes his hands and coughs. "You realise I've seen you in various states of undress before, right?" he asks, raising an eyebrow.

"Yeah, but…" she trails off, her eyes landing somewhere near the girls who are still messing around with the water. "Not around the girls."

"So…?" Soul shrugs. "I don't get it."

"You wouldn't." she murmurs, quieter now. "I'm… too skinny."

Soul scoffs, "Who among us _isn't_ too skinny? Every one of the four of us is probably severely malnourished." He makes a face. "I look like Jack Skellington these days."

"Yeah, well, I look like the _Corpse Bride_!"

"Alright, spooky-pants, you win," he shrugs. "Not sure why you care, anyway."

Maka doesn't know how to respond. "Neither do I, really. Guess some things really stick."

"Like the gross way that guys used to expect girls to look?"

Maka gives him a playful shove. "Don't act like you weren't guilty of that!" she grins. "You _men_ and your damn pornography. Giving us girls an unrealistic body image to try to attain, and then making us feel like we're inadequate when we don't look that way…"

Soul rolls his eyes. "Someone's got a chip on their shoulder."

She blinks, surprised. "I do not!"

He reaches his hands down to the water, cupping them together and collecting a small handful of the water before reaching back up and dumping it out unceremoniously over her head. Throughout the gesture, he doesn't say a word but Maka finds herself laughing at his completely laconic demeanour.

She splashes him back with a hard laugh and he flinches away. "Hmm, you afraid of a little water are ya, Shark-boy?"

"Shark boy?" he questions, raising a brow.

"You called me spooky-pants earlier!"

He nods in understanding, realising that she's talking about his spiky teeth. His hand instinctively flies to his face to cover them, but not before he flashes her a big, spiky grin.

"Oi, you two!" Liz calls from the other end of the pool. "Patty and I are going to explore a little bit. Alright with you?" she asks.

Maka nods distractedly as the two girls haul themselves out of the pool and shove their clothes back on, just out of sight. "Huh," she says, turning her attention back to Soul. "Wonder why they're disappearing off?"

Soul grimaces, a vague and hazy recollection of his conversation with Liz last night coming back to haunt him. "No idea," he lies, drawling. He reaches his arms above his head and stretches upwards, a big yawn escaping him. Maka has to restrain herself from immaturely poking her finger inside his mouth and instead accidentally finds herself gawping at his chest.

"Quit creeping on me, spooky-pants," he says at the end of his yawn, a tired and teasing smile appearing on his face.

"I wasn't!" she spouts indignantly, splashing him in the face again by way of a rebuttal.

He makes her jump suddenly as he splashes down so he's entirely submerged in the water.

He transforms partially, so that just a single one of his black and white blades pokes out from the surface, not unlike a shark's dorsal fin. Underwater, he swims in loose circles around her, pretending to be a shark.

She rolls her eyes even though he can't see her face, extending a leg out to kick him underwater. He surprises her, grabbing her leg and wrapping his arms and legs around it, pretending to capture her. She's splashing around in the water now, laughing hard, as she struggles against his joking shark impression. Luckily, the water's not deep enough for her to actually lose her footing for real and after a few seconds, Soul comes up for air with a big breath and shakes his wet hair out like a shaggy dog.

"You asshole!" Maka giggles, leaping from the rocky floor of the spring and launching herself at him front-first.

His first instinct is to reach his arms out and catch her.

Needless to say, they're both a little surprised when the whole exercise somehow ends in Maka's legs wrapped around Soul's waist as he holds her up by her thighs.

"Uh…" she murmurs, her face flushing just centimetres away from his.

"Well, what were you trying to do?"

"I don't know!" she protests, groaning and leaning her head back. "To get you underwater, I guess."

Soul grins, smug. "I win."

"Oh, do you count that as a win?" she teases him.

"What, a hot chick throwing herself at me?" he barks a laugh, cool as ever. "Yes, I count that as a win."

Maka's insides burn at that last comment, and in the second of silence that follows his retort, they seem to realise at the same time how compromising this position is for both parties.

That doesn't mean that they move, though.

Soul's eyes take on that half-lidded quality that they do often did, again, and Maka's face burns red as his gaze drops to her mouth. He's staring so intently at it, that Maka absently wonders if she's got food around her mouth or something.

Instead of snapping to her senses, like a good girl, she finds herself moving her legs so that they're wrapped even tighter round his waist as her hands busy themselves twiddling a wisp of his hair.

She's waiting for him to kiss her, she realises, as she dips her head down to nuzzle against the side of his neck. _Is she crossing a line_, she wonders?

"Maka," he states simply, still not managing to tear his eyes away from her lips.

"Yes?" she mutters, moving her head back to face him, curious.

He doesn't say anything, just leans forward into her.

She feels her blood coarsing through her body; bursting into liquid fire before she feels the physical sensation of his lips on hers. It's a little clumsy at first, but oh so sweet, she thinks, as he fingers the nape of her neck. He's leading her through it, but she's strangely nervous so she's grateful for that.

They stay still, kissing gently like that until Maka realises with a jolt that it's been about a minute since she came up for air. She breaks apart from him and inhales quickly, almost like a gasp.

There's a tentative silence, which Soul breaks first. "Ah, sorry," he says tersely, removing one hand from her waist to tangle into his own hair. He thinks for a second or two, and then settles on saying 'sorry' again.

Maka laughs. "Why are you sorry, idiot?"

He sends her a wary look, his eyes flashing a little darker than before. "I didn't know if you wanted that."

"How's this for confirmation?" she asks, before grabbing the back of his neck with a new violence, not sure if she's irritated or very pleased with herself. It didn't really matter, she thinks, as she elicits a sharp intake of breath from Soul.

He lets her control it, this time. She can feel the heat coming from his body; it's hotter than the water around them. The scent of him rises with it, intoxicating her. She's never kissed like this before.

She wonders, briefly, if it feels the same to him as it does to her.

Then, she bites him lightly on the bottom lip – drawing a groan out of him – and she doesn't have to wonder anymore.

Their bodies must be so tightly wound together, all legs and arms and lips wrapped around each other. Maybe that's why she feels so giddy – because he's cutting off the oxygen supply to her brain with that hand – _that hand_ \- on her neck.

She's just getting used to the sensation of his lips when he decides that she's too low down for his liking and hikes her up a little higher on his body; matches their hips to a symmetrical height.

She shudders violently in pleasure, and it must be palpable because Soul pulls away from her lips to ask her if she's okay.

Her brain has to come up with something on the fly to explain what just happened to her body, and she inadvertently blurts out: "I'm cold!"

He blinks at her as if she's just grown a third ear. "…we're in a hot spring…"

"I know that, idiot. I just, ah…" she scrambles to think of something, now mortified of her own body's betrayal. "I'm just worried that the girls' are going to come bustling around the corner," she admits, half-truthfully.

Soul's eyes begrudgingly move from her face to the other end of the spring and he sighs. "Yeah, I guess. This might be kind of weird to explain."

He lets go of her waist and she floats a little backwards on the water. Something angry and frustrated coarses violently through his blood; just for a second, but then it passes, and he leans back and enjoys the water flowing through and around his legs once again.


	25. Chapter 25

Liz is driving when they head back out onto the road again. They start slowly, inching their way out of town – having to take their time carefully weaving their way in and out of various blockades; abandoned cars; potholes. It's a new landscape, one that none of them recognise. Nothing like the old roads they used to know.

There's a strange atmosphere inside the confines of the car, too. Patty sits contently in the back, next to Maka, giggling periodically. Nobody asks her what she's laughing at. Liz and Soul are making awkward conversation in the front seat, and Maka's mind is racing.

Maka herself opts for staring out the window in silence, hearing snippets while Liz and Soul attempt a conversation in the front seat. She tunes into it every now and then, but they're talking about jazz music and she doesn't quite understand. It's like… her brain can hear the words, but she can't quite seem to understand them. She should be thinking about their kiss, earlier. She should be obsessing about every detail, like a normal girl. She should be happy. It had been a good kiss; hell, _amazing_ even.

But a strange feeling has come over her; her body and her brain, and she's not herself. Not remotely herself, even. Her fingers independently tremble on her legs as she struggles to make sense of her thoughts. It's jumbled, messy inside her mind.

_She's just anxious, she tells herself._

There's a deep throbbing coming from her injured arm; one that she's not felt for a week or so since it started to heal.

"You think you could play, now? Like, have you forgotten?" Maka vaguely hears Liz ask, at one point. She can barely hear the sound of their voices over the sound of her own panting breath.

Panting… like a dog…

_Is she hot?_

She's temporarily distracted from her thoughts while Soul, in the front, hesitates before answering. "Uh… probably. It's not something you really forget," he answers, seeming a little embarrassed. "I wouldn't want to waste time with it anymore, though. And it's loud – it attracts attention." He shrugs, his eyes flitting up to look at Maka again through the rearview mirror. When he catches her staring out the window, sullenly, his brows knit together in a frown. He wonders if he'd crossed a line earlier, if she was somehow mad at him.

He opens his mouth to ask but as soon as he does, Liz is down his throat with more questions. He resolves to keep an eye out on her through the mirror.

Maka, oblivious, stares out the window, trying desperately to suppress whatever seems to be happening to her body and mind. She feels on the edge, despite being relatively safe. Her arm throbs numbly beneath the bandages and her throat closes up.

Was that it? Was it her arm? Her mind swirls with the possibility as she wonders if perhaps the water had gotten into the bandages and messed with her wound.

_It can't be,_ she thinks. Soul's injury was more recent – and he was totally fine.

Although… hers had been a damn sight deeper.

Out the window, she focuses hard on a black blur which seems to be getting bigger in the distance. It's keeping up with the car's pace, she thinks absently. _What the hell is that?_

With a gasp of recognition, she realises that it's a black cat.

_A black cat? Seriously?_

It looked to the world like the very same one that she had been hallucinating back at her old place, before this whole journey had started out.

She frowns at it, and she swears that on it's face she can make out an almost imperceptible little grin.

Shudders travel through her shoulders and down her spinal cord.

In the front seat, Liz smiles, placated. "Well, I'd love to hear you someday. The way you talk about it is fascinating."

"It's a shame that my brother's dead. He's a violinist, one of the best in America," Soul boasts, allowing himself to feel just a little proud. Liz recoils in response to his blasé statement about his brother's death.

"You know he's dead for sure?" she asks, her voice soft.

Soul hesitates, and then nods. "Yeah," he swallows.

There's no more discussion of the matter. Liz tentatively coughs. "Well, it's a shame I never heard him play. I love the violin."

"Do you play?"

"I sing a little," Liz answers honestly. "But I'm not really smart enough to learn an instrument."

Soul shrugs. "I could probably teach you, if you really wanted."

She shrugs. "Maybe… once we get to this place in Nevada," she tells him, tightening her steely grip on the steering wheel.

Maka's heart thuds in her chest, wondering if there will be anyone alive in Nevada at all. She swallows the nausea rising in her stomach and tries her best to stay positive.

The cat is gone.

* * *

Hours tick by in the car.

Maka seems to drift in and out of consciousness for a little while, and loses track of the time., and when she wakes up, it's Liz next to her instead of Patty. Soul sits in the driver's seat while Patty and Liz continue to snore away, soundly napping.

"Soul," Maka hisses, looking around her at the scenery – mostly open roads and desert. "How close are we?"

"Couple hours more," he grimaces. "Are you okay?" he glances at her, a little concern on his face. "You look rough."

She doesn't answer that question. She doesn't want to think about it. "Do we have enough fuel?"

"I think so," he answers. His lack of surety sparks a further bout of anxiety in her heart.

"Well, do we have enough food? Water?"

"We're pretty low on both, honestly," he says. "We just need to get there, now. There'll be supplies at Shibusen."

"How are you so sure these guys are still alive?"

Soul shrugs. "Trust me, they'll be fine. I know… I know these guys."

Maka reaches between the gap between the seats and touches him on the forearm. "I don't… I don't feel that well, honestly." She admits. "I haven't for a few miles."

Soul stares hard at the hand that reached out and touched her for a second and his features burrow into a deep frown.

"Maka…" he stutters, slowing the car down. "Your _arm_."

She blinks twice; confused. Then it dawns on her that a strange, greenish brown substance is soaking through her bandaged arm. "O-oh," she says, quite faintly. "I guess that explains a lot."

Soul brings the car to a complete and total stop as he twists around, staring at Maka with an inscrutable expression on his face. He doesn't say anything; he doesn't have to. Internally, his mind is in overdrive.

_Had her wound opened?_

_Was she infected?_

_Had... he infected her?_

His face was white as a sheet. He hadn't thought about it until now. _He hadn't even entertained the possibility that... that he could be a carrier. That he could be spreading the virus. He'd had no idea what his status was, except that he never showed any symptoms, beyond minor ones when he was first bitten._

He racks his brain, trying to think back to what had happened to him, when he was first exposed. _A fever, sure. Maybe a headache._

He glances back at her, his heartbeat speeding up as he remember that the incubation period for the virus is around 20 days, give or take.

_20 days, he thinks. Has it been 20 days? More? Less?_

"Maka," he says slowly; quietly.

"Y-yes?" she looks up at him, terrified.

"Tell me how you are feeling." His voice is hard, rigid. Not quite angry, but something on the way there. Panicked, definitely.

"I feel… I feel drowsy. I feel ill. I want to vomit. Soul, I think I'm carsick. My arm hurts," her words come out in a jumble and Soul's heartbeat speeds up.

He yanks the handbrake on the car in an aggressive fashion and swings open the front door, running to the back in a sort of crazy sprint. When he opens the door, the first thing he does is ask her for her arm.

She presents it to him, still a little confused about what's got him so panicked. It must be the drowsiness, because she's having trouble keeping up.

He unwraps her bandages, which makes her wince a little, and then stares at the injury on her arm. "No, _fuck_…" he stares. It's infected, badly. It's a whitish green substance; the same thing that had happened to his bite wounds when he'd first been bitten. "_It can't be_..." he backs away, his mouth agape.

She almost laughs at his hysteria before she looks down at her arm, too. "Oh," is the only noise that comes out of her mouth.

"It's... infected," he says through clenched teeth. "Why didn't you tell me? Why didn't you tell me how you were feeling? Why didn't you tell me it hurt?"

"I didn't realise anything was wrong. I felt fine 'til only today," she says honestly. "Soul, am… am I going to be okay?" her eyes fill with tears. "It hurts," she says again. "It's just a normal infection, though, right? I can just... disinfect it? My body will fight it?"

"It's... gonna be fine," he says, but his eyes are blank and his face is unreadable.

Liz wakes up from the noise and frowns at the two of them. "Why… _why_ did we stop?" she asks, groggy. She's rubbing her tired eyes. "Why aren't we- Oh my GOD, your arm!" she wails, suddenly awake and spotting Maka's infected arm.

"It's fine, Liz," Soul hisses, jerking a thumb towards a still-sleeping Patty. "We're going to sort it out. No panic, yeah?"

He tells her to keep her arm stretched outwards and not touching anything while he runs round to the back to the trunk of the vehicle and rummages around in their supplies. He eventually comes back out with three bottles of water and an almost-empty tube of hand-sanitizer.

She looks up at him fearfully. "But.. that's the last of the supplies," she says, her worry carving lines in her forehead. "Don't you need something for your… injury?" she points at his torso but he shakes his head.

"I'll be fine. You need this more than me."

She nods, tearful. Soul hands a scrap of cloth. "Put this in your mouth. When it hurts, bite down on this, okay?"

She does so, as he dumps the last of the hand-sanitizer into her wound and begins to clean it out with nothing but the cleanest rag he can find and carefully poured out spring water.

She scream-cries into the cloth, sobbing through the searing pain. Her flesh is on fire; it's like he's burning away at her to the bone with every movement. Liz soothes her in one ear, whispering relaxing sentences and holding her other hand. "It'll be over in a second, Maka. You've got this. Well done, girl," she says, her voice low and mellow.

"Okay, I'm gonna wrap this up now," Soul says to no-one in particular – Maka is too in shock to hear anything anyway. He uses the cleanest scrap of cloth he can find and wraps it around, covering the wound. He then takes off the plaid shirt he's wearing and wraps it around Maka's neck and her arm, like a sling.

"That should do," he mutters, staring at his poor handiwork and sighing. He looks back up Maka, who is green in the face. "How are you feeling?"

She leans forward, her hand grabbing onto his shoulder for support before emptying her guts out right onto the floor by his feet. Vomit splashes everywhere, including all over his shoes.

"Why is she being sick?" Liz asks, concerned. "Soul, what the hell is wrong with her?"

Soul's face is white but he makes a severe face. "I would hardly say it's a good sign," he narrows his eyes, staring at the road ahead of them. "We need... to get to Shibusen, now." He decides, gently placing Maka's swaying torso in Liz's hands and jogging back over to the driver's seat, strapping himself in with more urgency than before.

"Liz, watch her, please," he says in a desperate-sounding plea, starting up the ignition for the car and slamming his foot down on the gas pedal.

His foot doesn't come off the ground for a good forty minutes. If Patty had woken up, she probably would have been quite surprised by the scene – Liz cooing into Maka's ear and stroking her hair, while she alternated between moaning in pain and falling almost completely unconscious – all while they zoom along at a hundred miles per hour due to Soul's white-knuckled disregard for speed limits.

"She's running a fever, Soul," Liz tells him after twenty minutes. "She's looking kinda bad."

"Liz," he says, quietly, looking at her in the rearview mirror. "I think she's infected." Ke keeps driving. Forward, he looks forward. He needs to keep going forward.

She squeaks, moving an inch away from Maka. "Infected with what?"

"The zombie virus, I think. Don't freak out."

Liz blinks, staring at Soul like he's grown three heads. "Uh, what? She hasn't been bitten... it's just a knife slash. I thought you said that you cut her with your blade...?" she wonders. "I don't get... wait, are you saying...?"

"I'm immune. I think I might be a carrier." he admits. "I didn't even think about this until now. Listen, Liz, we just need to get there, Liz. Just keep an eye on her. Please. Shibusen will help us. They might even have... a cure, or something..."

"I am, but at this pace you're going to run out of gas… or, or _crash us_!" Liz exclaims. "Just slow a little bit," she begs. "Jesus, Soul. We can't keep travelling with her. What if she turns into one of them and starts lashing out at us? These symptoms, they're exactly the symptoms that the news broadcasts said preceded rapid transition," she points out. "We're getting her out, now. We're leaving her behind. _Now_."

"No!" he exclaims. "We're not leaving her," he grits out, speeding up the car. "We can sort this out. We can get there before she turns... besides, I don't know for sure..." he trails off, unable to argue.

"Oh, for _God's_ sake, why are we risking _our_ lives for _hers_?!" Liz explodes. "You've got your priorities all screwed up." she snaps. "Slow the fuck down! I'm kicking her out!"

"Stop it, Liz!" Soul scoffs. "So you just want me to leave her to die? Well here's the picture: if you want to leave her, then you'd better leave me too. I'm not in the business of leaving anyone to die in the desert."

"I didn't say that." Liz crosses her arms. She might be angry, but she knows that they need Soul to survive, right now. Patty cracks one eye to observe the argument, and then slams it closed again, pretending to be asleep. "I just don't want to get infected myself, idiot. Soul, you're acting irrationally. You aren't thinking things through, and just because you want to get into Maka's _size 0 pants_!" Liz accuses and Soul rolls his eyes.

"Fuck you, Liz – next time I'll ask for your advice on the plan, shall I?" he spits. "Go on, what should we do?" he says, voice laden with sarcasm.

"We should have… have taken two cars…" she sighs, angrily. "For fuck's sake," she runs a hand through her hair. "I can't believe you're going to stick with her."

"Thanks for the 20:20 hindsight, Liz," Soul growls. "Any more advice? Maybe Maka shouldn't have gotten an infection, huh? Maybe none of this bullshit should have happened in the first place, how about _that_?" he retorts, his voice raising just a modicum.

Liz flinches. In the short time she's known him, she's never known him to be anything less than laconic.

There's a brief silence which follows, and then he takes one hand off the steering wheel to run a hand through his greasy hair. "Sorry, Liz."

She sighs, mellowing out. "It's okay," she says, her teeth still clenched against her best efforts. "But if she even looks like she might be slightly turning into one of them... I'll kill her myself."

There's a heavy silence which follows that silence. Liz adds: "Thanks for slowing down."

Soul swallows, his throat thick with fear. "Uh… that's not me, actually."

Liz's heart leaps in fear. "W-what?"

The car makes a few clunky noises, and rolls helplessly to a stop while Liz and Soul internally sweat bullets.

Patty tries even harder to pretend to be asleep.

"Y-your foot… it's on the gas?"

"Yes," he grits out, irritated. "_Shit_." Soul starts the ignition again, beginning to swear profusely, but the car won't turn on. "Fuck, _fuck_. This seriously can't be happening now."

As if to punctuate his point, Maka moans from the backseat in pain and fever.

"What's wrong with it? Is it out of gas?" Liz asks, her voice trembling; bordering on hysterical.

"Shouldn't be. It had only just started flashing," he kicks his foot angrily against the floor. Liz can see the sweat sheen from his forehead as he tries once again to get the car to start. His efforts are met with deafening silence, and then: "Dammit!"

Soul's head falls into his hands helplessly.

"Soul," Liz says hoarsely. "What are we going to do?"

He twists round to look at her and Maka, still feverish and not fully lucid. "I… I don't know." His voice is exhausted, defeatist and pathetic. It's like nothing Liz has ever heard, and something about it makes her head clear a little.

She clenches her fists.

"Soul." She says, gathering her wits together. "We're going to have to walk this,"


	26. Chapter 26

They trudge through the blistering heat; Soul carrying Maka's minute frame over his shoulders. With every step, he's acutely aware of her vitals reaching a fever pitch. There's a distinct lack of speaking or even non-verbal communication among the conscious.

Patty and Liz take it in turns to carry each other in their gun form. Minutes become hours as their muscles grow weaker, their bodies becoming more and more in need of water; of a break. They don't stop the whole time, they can't stop. Soul concentrates on putting one foot in front of the other for as long as it takes; keeping Maka's limp figure cradled around his neck for at long as he needs to. He's monitoring her heartbeat, he can feel it through his neck and shoulders.

His body; his mind switches to survival mode. Nothing matters, not to him. Nothing except keeping his heart beating and his legs moving.

Patty attempts to keep spirits high and conversation flowing at first, but after a few minutes it becomes clear to all them that they need to preserve their energy.

After just one hour, Soul's legs begin aching. His bones feel like they are about to just bend under the sheer pressure; the desert just stretching on and on and on, full of false horizons. It feels infinite. Being in the car feels like days ago. Being in the hot springs feel like _weeks_ have passed.

After two full hours, Liz swears that she starts to hear voices. Blurred sounds buzz in her ears, speaking to her directly. She shakes her head, tries her best to ignore it.

Their faces hurt from the blistering heat and beating sun burning their skin every minute.

After they lose count of the hours, Soul begins to quite seriously question his memory of Shibusen and his sense of direction – allowing the niggling doubt to creep in; wondering if they've been heading in the wrong direction this whole time. For hours, all he's been able to see is desert. More desert. Occasionally, the odd desert rock but even those become sparse.

_Paranoia_, he tells himself. _That's all it is._

It becomes a mantra.

Eventually, the darkness descends on them, offering at least a little cool wind through their exhausted bones. At first, it's almost refreshing. But the desert gets cold at night.

"S-soul," Patty shivers from the sudden wind – the first word that any of them has uttered in about six miles. "Soul," she says again, her voice getting louder. "I can't. I can't walk anymore," she rasps out. "I… I…"

She falls dramatically onto her knees, the impact making a small puffy sound in the sand and falling over onto her side. Soul's eyes widen with alarm and he lifts Maka from his shoulders temporarily. He places her down, stretching her grey body out in the sand.

His shoulders slump down as he reaches down to help Patty up from the rough ground. "Patty?" he calls, concerned. She doesn't respond.

She's passed out, he realises. Liz, in gun form, now transforms – and immediately bends over her sister. "_Patty_," she half-sobs. "What's wrong with her, Soul?"

He doesn't know the answer to that. He makes something up. "She's just dehydrated. She probably has sunstroke. She'll be okay, Liz," his voice is soft, sympathetic, but not overly convincing.

"Jesus, Soul, are we going to die?" Liz asks, terrified.

"I… I…" he stutters, completely unable to provide an adequate answer. "I'm… going to keep going. Look after Patty and Maka. M-maybe if I can get to Shibusen, I can send some help," he shivers.

The desert winter bites at them; nips at their skin in freezing bursts of cold energy.

"No!" Liz clutches his arm, not letting him leave. "No, you can't leave me on my own!" she cries. "_Please_!"

He shakes his head. "M-Maka needs medical attention," he croaks out through his bone-dry lungs. "They'll have what we need at Shibusen," he says, looking determinedly at the horizon.

"S-soul," Liz gasps through her sobs. "What if this place… shut down? What if everyone is dead?" she pauses, sinking even lower. "If we're going to die out here, Soul, I don't want to die on my own."

Soul runs a hand through his hair for the last time, but he just shakes his head as he focuses on Maka's unconscious body. He purses his lips. He wrestles out of her weak grasp. "I'm sorry, Liz."

He can still hear her crying over her sister as he continues on through the desert. He's lost the weight of Maka on his shoulders, but strangely, he doesn't feel any lighter. He keeps his footsteps going. He decides to count them, after a while. One, two, three, four.

Inside his mind, he composes a symphony from the beat of his footsteps. He tries with all his effort to concentrate on the symphony; one, two, three and four. He sticks with it for a few measures; wondering where he's heard that song before. Wondering if he just made it up. Wondering why the beats are beginning to drag and looking down, realising that he's involuntarily dragging his feet with every step.

He looks behind him, but the girls have ceased to be visible - it's too dark now to see anything. In front, he still can't make out the lights of Death City; of Shibusen; of anything.

His mind tells him to fall asleep, standing up.

He forces himself to keep thinking of Maka, and keeps going.

Maka.

"I infected you, Maka, I'm sorry. I'm going to make it up to you. I _swear_." he repeats, another mantra.

Twenty minutes later, he feels the sand hit against his face long before he intellectually realises that he's fallen over in it. For a second, it feels like the world's fallen upwards, but that's not the case.

The darkness that's been kept at bay for this long begins to close in around him, suffocating him. His legs stubbornly refuse his efforts to get back on his feet and instead insist upon curling him up in the sand; like a concertina. Like an embryo.

He knows nothing but sand and darkness and pain and cold. He can't move; he can't even think. _Should he just wait for death? Is this what Liz was talking about, dying alone?_

_Wait_...

There's a pinprick of light in the distance. _Is he imagining that? _

There's a tiny glimmer; a sliver of something permeating through the dark - what is it?

It's _blinding_...

* * *

**Thanks for reading this story so far, guys.**

**I feel like this is probably the end of 'Part 1' as it were. Not sure whether to continue on in another fic or continue on in this one.**

**But yeah- specially thanks to DarkHazen and Lennox13 for being consistent reviewers. I don't care if nobody else is reading this except for you guys - you've been amazing reviewers :)**


	27. Chapter 27

**Hey guys, part 2 is going to be in a new fic called 'moonrise' on this account.**

**Please follow that other fic if you want to keep reading! Or if not, that's cool too! Thanks :)**


End file.
